A reception, in the presence of the artist, will be held at KM Fine Arts Los Angeles on November 1, 7-10.
For members only of Soho House West Hollywood there will be a Private Viewing of the exhibition and Q&A with Kourtney Roy on November 2st, 6:30 – 8:30pm
This body of fine art photography “Enter as Fiction” was prompted by Louis Vuitton asking talented fashion photographers such as Guy Bourdin in Miami and Roy to create unique insights of a city. Thus, Roy travelled through California on a two month long road trip. Roy, who now lives in Paris, has immersed her self into the California road trip car culture. Her car doubled as a mobile studio and wardrobe; packed with wigs, vintage clothes and accessories, she hit the open road in search of her stage.
“My work has become much more involved in a search for the unexpected and marvelous within the world. I am literally driving around with my assistant, scanning the countryside, towns and suburbs, searching for a beautiful accident. The idea of the accident or the chance encounter is a large part of my work”. Kourtney
Roy’s work reflects her love affair with the Cinema. This is seen in this series of self-portraits of her avatar self placed in often banal and witty fictional narrative scenes of every day life. The viewer is encouraged to complete the story of this captured moment – a before and after.
The characters she portrays are sad and impassive, locked into an ordinary existence that alludes to past decades. In their composition, these images are reminiscent of wide-open and surreal spaces or cinematic backdrops, punctuated by the occasional pop culture reference. Roy creates a shiny world with a tongue in cheek dark humor. She is intrigued by the possibility of creating a tragic mythology of the self; she conjures an intimate universe pervaded by both wonder and mystery. Her photographer’s eye is drawn to places and settings whose lyrical qualities underscore the sublime banality of everyday life.
Roy is a Canadian photographer born in Ontario in 1981and lives in Paris. She studied photography at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver and later at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux – Arts, Paris. There she developed her finicky aesthetic, which lends itself particularly well to glossy paper like those of Guy Bourdin or Gregory Crewdson before her.
The same aesthetic is translated in her commercial work and her work has appeared in publications such as: Numéro, Vogue, Japan, Vogue Gioiello, Sunday Times Magazine, GQ France, D Magazine and Esquire UK.
She has been awarded the Prix Picto de la Jeune Photographie de Mode in 2007, the Prix Carte Blanche PMU/Le Bal in 2013 and in 2014 was nominated for the Prix Elysée awarded by the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. Roy’s work has been exhibited widely in France and abroad. She was seen at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2008, the Planche Contact Festival in Deauville in 2012 and Le Bal in Paris in 2014, Vichy Portraits Festival 2015, The Moscow Photo Biennale in 2017 among other events and venues. She has also exhibited in China (Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai), Italy, Switzerland and Australia (Head on Photo Festival in Sydney in 2013)
