This new series by Canadian Kourtney Roy, Sorry, No Vacancy, reveals a parallel universe where the imaginary spreads like a net over the contours of the world. Continuously throughout her work, the photographer uses her own image, making it a character in a world overflowing with strange and mysterious associations and scenarios.
She has, thus, summoned the ineffable in the immense and isolated spaces of southwestern Texas. The decors of this series are transitory places in the margins: remote highways, abandoned souvenir shops, and forsaken cities that seem to float on the landscape like ghost images of a bygone era. These places become Roy’s playing field as she indulges these distorted, cryptic rituals.
Her images bring us back to the big screen and to a collective iconography that englobes American cinema, mythology, and folklore. Their references are, themselves, representations, like a mise en abyme under tension where reality and its focal points are difficult to distinguish. The images combine reality with the symbolic and the fictional, where the possible is reflected in an ephemeral state meticulously created and recorded by Kourtney Roy. We are reminded of André Bazin when he wrote on the creation of images today: “It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own autonomous destiny.”
Kourtney Roy, Sorry, No Vacancy
September 28 through October 28, 2017
Galerie Catherine and André Hug
40, rue de Seine / 2, rue de l’Échaudé
75006 Paris
France
