Kourtney Roy

Kourtney Roy, whose self-portraits plunge us into an imaginary universe where remnants of the past merge with the contemporary performance of the artist. In each of her photographs, we find her, most often alone, or rather inscribed in a unique sensation which has little to do with the feeling of isolation, for it presupposes the presence of a memory. Each photograph represents a temporal meeting that reveals an ephemeral instant marked by the precise encounter of action with place. Kourtney Roy makes a mark of her presence in the world in the interval of an illusion. Like a silver screen heroine, her body becomes one with the décor, whether by crawling on the ground or jumping behind an innocuous shrub.

The settings and the spaces are sources of inspiration underlining a poetics of the banal and the quotidian. Forgotten and empty places often exude a sense of calm or of strangeness, a space-time which permits the artist to express herself and to lose herself in the literal or figurative sense much like the heroes of Terence Malick’s film Badlands. An exquisite image is produced, which at first seems a safe harbour, a place of grace or of liberty, but which progressively shimmers and falters under the punishing rays of the sun to reveal an inescapable truth: the deserted wilds are harsh and empty of hope for those in search of solitude.

Trashissima examines consumer society, environmental degradation, and human waste through a theatrical, highly stylized lens. Shot during a two-month residency at the Berdoulat waste treatment and landfill facility in southwestern France, Roy transforms a landscape of trash, discarded plastic, and industrial refuse into a stage for performative self-portraiture.

Rather than adopting a traditional photojournalistic or purely documentary stance, Roy casts herself in various tragicomic, absurd, and cinematic personas amid heaps of garbage. Her brightly colored, saturated, and carefully orchestrated compositions create a stark aesthetic tension between visual beauty and environmental ruin.