INTERMONDE

For her exhibition Intermonde, Geneviève Roy proposes an environment rooted in exploring physical and psychic spaces. Her work draws on her background as an architect––a profession she practiced as her first career, and also on identity as a form of quest in which she probes her emotional relationship to places from her past. At the height of the 2020 confinement, she returned to her childhood home, which acted as a catalyst for a process already in gestation and triggered a reflection on built space and memory. Faced with a shrinking social life, the artist imagines devices that echo a sudden descent into the self: she exploits the duality of inside and outside, of the hidden and the revealed through a play of viewpoints to engage the viewer.

In the gallery, the space the exhibition occupies immediately highlights this interior/exterior aspect due to the imposing wooden structure that the artist calls “pièce-vaisseau.” In relation to the gallery size, this piece forms a container that activates the photographs on the walls as the periphery, a kind of external environment. These are photographic investigations stemming from a first draft of the Intermonde corpus in which the artist filmed on construction sites (notably those of the Francon quarry and the Clark esplanade) to produce enigmatic images, distanced from the documentary function of photography in favor of polysemic evocations. Here, it is a matter of photomontage in which several layers of these building-site images create constructed landscapes. It would be tempting to use the adjective unreal, but in Geneviève Roy’s approach, the represented spaces are not distinguished by whether or not they belong to reality. Her work draws inspiration from psychoanalysis, suggesting rather that the images come from blurred memories or even the imagination, which belongs to a form of psychic reality as true as physical reality.

All around the “pièce-vaisseau,” many holes draw the viewer’s gaze inside. Here, there are items suggesting Roy’s life, her artistic work (desk, notebooks, sketches, etc.) and her emotional links to certain memories-objects, the content of which one cannot fully grasp. However, the overall installation suggests a particular concept of domestic space, exacerbated in 2020, and summarized in the continuum of living-working-creating-dreaming. Indeed, the artist is not accustomed to having a separate studio, preferring to organize all of her activities in a living space that has multiple, yet unified functions. This embodied relationship to place supports the “apartment-building,” an interwoven construction within the “pièce-vaisseau,” nested like a box within a box. On five stations or floors, places that were important to Roy are reconstructed in the form of models or dioramas of varying scales, angles and confections, according to memories that sometimes date back many years. The location and orientation of the openings direct the viewpoints from which the artist offers a simultaneously restrained and voyeuristic plunge into intimate and crowded territories, where a fragmented narrative takes place. Here, free associations among objects, moments of biography (a university stay in France, the death of the father, a childhood dream) and the distortions of memory intermingle.

Despite the self-centred aspect of the quest that underlies the Intermonde corpus, Geneviève Roy proposes a reflection on the mechanisms of the psyche that go beyond her own past. This is the starting point of a formal work in which the representation of space avoids the normative framework of architecture and exposes that it is never neutral: the subjectivity of experience perpetually transforms it.

Bio of the author

Marie-Pier Bocquet is an author and art historian, who holds a master’s degree in art history from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2020). She is also the artistic director and general manager of Arprim, an artist-run centre for printmaking. Since 2014, she has been on the editorial board of the drawing magazine HB. And she has curated exhibitions such as Perspectives excentrées at Zocalo, centre d’artistes (2021), Faire monde : regard sur les microcosmes de Catherine Magnan et d’Andréanne Gagnon, at artist-run centre Caravansérail (2014) and co-curated the exhibition HB nº 6 / HORS PAGE, presented at Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark (2017). Her texts have been published in esse arts + opinions, Espace art actuel and Vie des arts, as well as in opuscules for Galerie Art Mûr, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark and CIRCA art actuel.

Bio of Geneviève Roy

Originally from Quebec City, Geneviève Roy lives and works in Montreal. In addition to her architectural training at Université Laval (Quebec City), she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montreal). In 2010, she made the transition from architecture to art, having worked as an architect for two decades. In the context of a master’s degree in visual and media arts (UQAM), the artist is pursuing her research on the built environment, questioning the physical and psychic space of domestic and urban places chosen for their symbolic value. Using a photographic installation approach, she attempts to capture and translate the complex links between the inner space of thought and affectivity, and the outer world – architectural, familial and social – that shape our existence. A Canada Council grant recipient, her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Quebec, Lyon, Winnipeg and New York.