Installation view, Lyne Lapointe, Becoming Animal, 2025 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY © Lyne Lapointe. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio. The act of transformation—whether personal, material, or conceptual—has long been a site of artistic inquiry. To become something else, to slip between categories, to challenge the fixity of identity is to resist the very structures that seek to confine. This idea pulses at the heart of Lyne Lapointe's latest exhibition, Becoming Animal, currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, the exhibition takes its title from the philosophers' notion of shedding human-centered perception in favor of a more fluid, instinctual, and interconnected existence. In Lapointe's hands, this principle extends beyond theory and manifests materially, rendering the body as something mutable—neither fully human nor wholly other, yet entirely alive in its evolving state.
Lapointe's work has always been deeply attuned to the vulnerability and resilience of the body, both as a physical form and as a site of social inscription. Here, her mixed-media compositions push this investigation further, integrating found objects and organic materials that blur the line between subject and environment. Ink, glass beads, coral, abandoned beehives—each component carries its own history, yet becomes part of a new entity, a hybrid existence that resists easy categorization. The body, in Lapointe's vision, is not merely represented but reimagined, dissolving into and emerging from its surroundings in an ongoing act of becoming.
In Beehives Apiarists (2024), for instance, Lapointe affixes beehives to the figures, their structures acting as both armor and extension of the body. Coated in propolis—a resinous substance bees use for protection—the piece suggests a delicate yet determined symbiosis between human and non-human worlds. Similarly, In Vitro (2024) juxtaposes blown glass eggshells, hemp, and recycled linens, materials that speak to cycles of life, fragility, and regeneration. Each piece is an assemblage of histories, a confluence of remnants repurposed to tell new stories.
Throughout the exhibition, Lapointe continues her longstanding engagement with gender fluidity and the politics of embodiment. While her earlier works often centered femininity, Becoming Animal moves beyond binary distinctions, presenting figures that defy fixed identity. In The Head and the Body (2024), deep black ink meets shimmering gold leaf, conjuring a psychological duality—an interplay of concealment and illumination, opacity and radiance. The figures, at once corporeal and spectral, embody a space of transition, refusing to be pinned down by the societal markers that dictate form and function.
Lapointe's practice is as much about process as it is about final composition. Her careful selection of materials, her engagement with sustainable sourcing, and her reverence for the histories embedded in objects all reinforce an ethos of interconnectedness. These works do not merely depict bodies in flux—they enact transformation, embodying the very philosophy they explore.
Ultimately, Becoming Animal is an invitation: to unlearn rigid ways of seeing, to inhabit multiplicity, to embrace the porous boundaries between self and world. In a time when identity is increasingly policed and bodies are sites of contestation, Lapointe offers an alternative—a vision where existence is fluid, adaptive, and defiantly uncontained.
