moom bookshop

‘The Tourist’ contains all the hallmarks of Kourtney Roy’s recognisable and appealing style: self-portraiture, a filmic approach, and characteristic vivid colour palette. But it also shows a tension between the witty and the sinister, the conventional and the unorthodox, the glamour and the sleaze. Roy is a virtuoso of context creation, and her exceptional crafting of the point where we depart our existential world and enter the intentional one she provides for us is nothing short of admirable. Roy creates a playful visual metaphor for a world we believe we know, yet through her clever use of juxtaposition we quickly realise that it is not quite the world it seems to be.

Roy (b.1981) was born in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, Canada. She holds a degree in media studies specializing in photography from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Roy is currently based in Paris, France, where she has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally for over 10 years at such events and venues as Le Bal, Paris, the Musée Elyséé, Lausanne, The Head On Photo Festival in Sydney and the Moscow International Photo Biennale.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Prix Picto (2007), Emily Award (2012), Carte Blanche PMU (2013), The Prix Elysée Nomination (2014) and The Canadian Council for the Arts artist grant (2015). Several books have been published on her work, including Ils pensent déjà que je suis folle (Editions Filigranes, 2014), Northern Noir (Editions La Pionnière, 2016), and California (Editions Louis Vuitton, 2016).