MARINA ROY

Marina Roy is a Vancouver based artist working across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, video, performance and writing. Roy has exhibited work across Canada, as well as in Europe and  the U.S. She is assistant professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, UBC since 2002. The ideas investigated in her artwork and writing stem from her ongoing research in such areas as psychoanalysis, gender, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published the book sign after the x ______ , published by Arsenal Pulp Press and Artspeak. She is currently working on a new book Queuejumping, which will investigate the construction of nature, nomadism, human-animal distinction, and the letter Q.

NEWS: May 09, 2010 - Winners of British Columbia's Largest Visual Arts Awards Announced

VANCOUVER.- British Columbia's most prestigious annual award for the visual arts, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, and the VIVA Awards will be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery on May 12, 2010. The seventh annual Audain Prize, awarded by the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, will be presented to renowned Haida artist Robert Davidson. The VIVA Awards, granted annually by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation, will go to Vancouver artists Germaine Koh and Marina Roy. 

The letterpress prints in this series use a variety of formal textual devices and influences—from monuments, signage, lists, concrete poetry—to deliver words, phrases, and quotes loosely related to the history of creaturely (or bare) life, in contrast to sovereignty and dominance. According to Giorgio Agamben, bare life is the mirror image of the sovereign; it is the embodiment of the “exception” within society, positioned outside of the law.

As social power structures become increasingly internalized within each subject’s body, so do these textual elements appear constricted by established aesthetic conventions—the monochrome, the “conceptual art” list—not to mention the limits of the mode of production itself. However, the use of obsolete technology to produce these works points to what could be construed as a melancholic reflection on history and our present moment: how we are most often caught within a negative infinity of new more cunning power structures from which it is difficult to find a way out. Psychoanalytic discourse also finds its way into these prints, in the form of language play, the use of the “totemic” animal in swearing as a mark of Oedipal defiance and desire, and the general sense of an underlying unconscious of civilization permeating these works.

MARINA ROY

Each of us…
[ Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
21x15 inches
edition of 30
$400

MARINA ROY

The Creature
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
22x15 inches
edition of 20
$400

MARINA ROY

The Creature [detail]
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
22x15 inches
edition of 20
$400

MARINA ROY

Totem & Taboo
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
29.5x14.5 inches”
edition of 16
$400

MARINA ROY

Totem & Taboo, [detail]
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
29.5x14.5 inches”
edition of 16
$400

MARINA ROY

Gas Heat Water & Cable on All Fours
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
22x14.5 inches
edition of 22
$400

MARINA ROY

Lube Shocks & Exhaust While U Wait
[Leterpress ink on paper, 2009]
22x14.5 inches
edition of 25
$400

MARINA ROY

Angels in the Angles - 2009

Gallery & Event Documentation

MARINA ROY

sign after the x ____
Artspeak / Advance Editions - Arsenal Pulp
2001

Price: $18.95 CAD
ISBN-13: 9781551521121

MARINA ROY

Bread

bronze
approx. 5 x 5 inches each
1993

Totem & Taboo

Wood & paperbacks (all titles of books have something to do with animals: e.g.The Flounder)  Ink/pencil on foreedge of books
approx. 9.5x1 ft. each
2003 

Totem & Taboo
(detail)

Fridge

Fridge (verso; without mirror)

Enamel on glass; mirror 
5.5 x 4 feet 
2004

Apartment from Marina Roy on Vimeo.

Apartment by Marina Roy is a 56-minute animation inspired by Georges Perec’s 1978 novel La vie, mode d’emploi, in which the author takes the reader through 100 rooms of an apartment building, following a knight’s move in chess. Roy’s one hundred vignettes follow a similar path through an apartment building, and investigate a number of intersecting ideas: natural history, utopia, hedonism, and human-animal distinction/relations to name a few. Wild plants and animals slowly take over deteriorating rooms as the residents gradually succumb to a mysterious virus. The piece could be interpreted as offering an anti-humanist scenario within a post-historical era. Sound was produced by Graham Meisner.