Kourtney Roy

My photographic practice explores fragmented and anecdotal narratives through a combination of self-portraits and landscapes. Each photograph reveals small slivers of a story that is both incomplete and mysterious. The regular use of myself as the main protagonist in my work examines the multiplicity and ineffability of identity as well as it enables the literal fragmentation and deconstruction of the individual. I photographed California (Enter as Fiction) in the Spring of 2015 in California. I spent 2 months travelling around the state photographing the banal and mundane places that I came across. I wanted to create striking and surreal stories out of very simple spaces that normally go unnoticed in the daily routines and lives that surround these places. My intention was to imbue a sense of magic as well as the absurd in these brightly lit and seemingly unremarkable landscapes. Much of my work is informed by the North American landscape ― vast stretches of empty wilderness interspersed with parking lots, highways, gas stations, and dotted with small hubs of industry mixed with sleepy residential neighbourhoods. These topographies haunt the periphery of my imagination, inhabiting and informing my memories (real or imagined), dreams and practice. The images are often suffused with an uncanny dimension; suddenly what was once so familiar and unquestioned becomes the breeding ground for uncertainty and reconfiguration. There is a secret potential of the world to transform itself at any moment into a cinema set. It is this secret potential that I seek to unveil in my photographic wanderings.