Marina Roy is Vancouver-based artist and writer whose work explores the intersection between language and visual art. She received her BA in French Literature at Université Laval, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and her MFA from the University of British Columbia. She has shown nationally and internationally, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, the Or Gallery Berlin, Gallery Sumukha, Chennai & Bengaluru, India, and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Roy was recipient of the VIVA award in 2010. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp Press), a book that revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings. She is currently working on the next book, titled Queuejumping. She is Associate Professor of Visual Art at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
Lorna Brown is a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Brown received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015), the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Director/Curator of Artspeak 1999–2004.
…
MARINA ROY
March 17–April 21, 2001
This exhibition, titled with the punctuation “…”, takes as its central theme the medium of typography and the form of the book. A series of altered books, titled Thumbsketches sculpturally intervenes in familiar texts, evoking bodily memories of books as sensual and intimate objects. The artist has drawn on the cut ends of paperback editions of such tomes as Balzac’s Lost Illusions and The Complete Poems of Keats. When pressed behind plexiglas mounts, the drawings stretch and splay in animated shifts of perspective. The work leans upon and skews our associations of revered texts with irreverent, often scatological defacements.
A companion work, a large canvas titled The following…, uses hot foil stamped letters arranged in a grid. The text is taken from Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses wherein he describes the painting Las Meninas by Velasquez. One word flows into another without punctuation marks and new words are created in the process, breaking down the authority of the descriptive text. The canvas, similar in scale to Las Meninas, comments on the differences in the use of allegory in the 17th and 20/21st centuries yet similarly ’hides’ the subject as the central focal point of power.
Marina Roy has exhibited her work nationally and internationally since 1992 and her practice includes a wide range of media including sculpture, printmaking, painting, photography and bookworks. She holds a Master’s Degree in Visual Art from University of British Columbia and completed her undergraduate studies at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Prior to her study in visual arts, she received a Bachelor of Arts in French Literature from Universite Laval. Roy currently teaches in the Visual Art Program at the University of Victoria.