Kourtney Roy
"Queen of Nowhere"

Exhibition: 2 June – 15 September 2022
Opening: Thursday, 2 June, 6 - 9pm

Who is Kourtney Roy? By turns rebel woman, fatal beauty or overworked housewife, the photographer plays with stereotypes and enjoys taking on different roles to blur the lines in her colourful self-portraits.

Born in Ontario, Canada, her father was a cowboy... it is not surprising that she conceives the world as a vast movie set ready to welcome her fantasy. Urban landscapes or desert expanses become a set waiting for the artist’s entrance.

Quite an artist... Able to take on all the jobs : from the storyboard she imagines to the styling, including framing, lighting, make-up, directing actors... Kourtney Roy is definitely a jack-of-all-trades.

If the idea of posing in front of the camera while transforming herself is not new - some compare her to Cindy Sherman - few photographers manage to achieve such a degree of perfection in the staging. Without forgetting what makes her work so special, the humour that is always present in her creations.

The exhibition Queen of Nowhere presented at the Galerie Esther Woerdehoff cleverly reminds us of this by mixing several series made over a decade. Enter as fiction, my favourite, which I chose to exhibit at the Festival du Regard in Cergy-Pontoise as part of the "Intime and Autofiction" theme, but also Sorry, No Vacancy and the one that was the subject of her latest book The Tourist, undoubtedly the most mature...

Did her transition to the fortyish got the better of the enfant terrible? On the contrary, here she is, more glamorous than ever, accompanied by handsome men with bulging muscles; Sue Ellen, not yet decadent but already a great lover of cocktails, abandoning the atmosphere of film noir for technicolor blockbusters. As you can see, Kourtney’s self-mockery reigns supreme, which goes without saying for a Queen of Nowhere...

Text: Sylvie Hugues

Kourtney Roy was born in 1981 in Ontario, Canada. She studied Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in photography. She began making self-portraits at the university. Between fashion portraiture, theatricality and everyday photography, her work shows the cross-over influences between these worlds. Her work blends fiction and self-fiction, and explores the sublime and the strange in everyday life, in settings tinged with mystery. Kourtney Roy has won numerous awards for her colourful, dreamlike and carefully crafted photographs.