A road in a bluish blizzard, a close-up of a phone booth, a gas pump, or a motel sign lit by a red light, like a tire track in the snow that appears bloodied… like the fingers of a hand also captured in close-up… Red, too, like the vinyl upholstery of an empty car seat, also captured in close-up, or the seatbacks a man with a lost look clutches… Proceeding through leitmotifs, echoes, and repetitions, the photography of Kourtney Roy (born in 1981) is intrinsically haunting because it is aesthetically obsessive. Obsessive through its motifs (deserted roads, signs, skies, nights, fog, snow…), its colors (predominantly blood red and pool blue), and its framing (primarily close-ups or extreme wide shots).
While in her self-portraits the photographer indulges a whimsical, almost absurd, fantasy, in her series *The Other End of the Rainbow*, she serves suspense… and, if not pathos (which she virtuously avoids through a masterful use of the unspoken and the hidden), at least horror and empathy for the victims to whom she pays tribute. A kind of tragic culmination of the fictional worlds the Canadian photographer has created for years, the subject addressed in this series is indeed dramatic: for over forty years, along Highway 16, a road in northern British Columbia (Canada's westernmost province), women and girls, mostly from First Nations (the Indigenous peoples of Canada), have been disappearing. It was on this 720 km long stretch, dubbed the "road of tears", that Kourtney Roy focused her lens between 2017 and 2019, in order to photograph the places that witnessed the tragedies.
"How can one give meaning to an insignificant place?" she wondered. "The banality of the places I photographed suggests the presence of sinister events as much as it conceals them."
In her quest for the genius loci, that "spirit of the place" "that gives meaning to a particular location," the photographer has managed to render almost palpable the strange feeling of a pervasive presence along this road of tears from one end to the other. A long-term project, straddling the line between artistic and documentary photography, this "narrative of a news item through images" takes on the appearance of a narrative puzzle in the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, which presents excerpts alongside testimonies gathered during the artist's travels.
A book published by André Frère presents it in its entirety.
“THE OTHER END OF THE RAINBOW” – THE GIRLS OF CALVARY
17, RUE DES FILLES-DU-CALVAIRE, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL FEBRUARY 24 (CLOSED FROM JANUARY 15 TO 25)
LESFILLESDUCALVAIRE.COM
