KOURTNEY ROY – ENTER AS FICTION

In each of her photographs, we find her, most often alone, or rather inscribed in a unique sensation which has little to do with the feeling of isolation, for it presupposes the presence of a memory. Each photograph represents a temporal meeting that reveals an ephemeral instant marked by the precise
encounter of action with place.
Kourtney Roy makes a mark of her presence in the world in the interval of an illusion. Like a silver screen heroine, her body becomes one with the décor, whether by crawling on the ground or jumping behind an innocuous shrub. The settings and the spaces are sources of inspiration underlining a poetics of the banal and the quotidian. Forgotten and empty places often exude a sense of calm or of strangeness, a space-time which permits the artist to express herself and to lose herself in the literal or figurative sense much like the heroes of Terence Malick’s film Badlands. An exquisite image is produced, which at first seems a safe harbour, a place of grace or of liberty, but which progressively shimmers and falters under the punishing rays of the sun to reveal an inescapable truth: the deserted wilds are harsh and empty of hope for those in search of solitude. By traversing Route 66 – the Mother Road, as it is known in America – she captures the forgotten landscape of mythic America: “If you go to the West, take my way…”, as sung by Nat King Cole. This is the West that stirs up our nostalgia for the “road” of Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Baghdad Café.

Exhibition runs through to December 5th, 2015

Galerie Catherine et André Hug
40, rue de Seine / 2, rue de l’Échaudé
75006 Paris

www.galeriehug.comm

ELLEN CAREY – POLAROID 20 X 24 SELF-PORTRAITS

Ellen Carey (b. 1952) is one of the country’s foremost experimental photographers. Her pioneering work with the large-format Polaroid 20 x 24 camera spans several decades and anticipated major themes in contemporary photography. Carey began working with the camera in New York in 1983, starting with her Self-Portrait series. Her experimentation with abstraction in these images was a precursor to her later, purely abstract Pulls. Though still representational, these self-portraits were anomalous to the themes of image appropriation and cultural politics that occupied her peers in the Pictures Generation. In contrast, Carey used the self as subject to explore the unseen. The photographs feature the artist’s likeness overlaid with wild psychedelic patterns, and figures from mathematics-fractals, Pythagorean golden means, sacred geometry- that describe a hidden order within nature, or point to transcendent realms. Known for her technical virtuosity, these complex and layered compositions were made without a darkroom and pre-date digital imaging technologies with an uncanny prescient sense of the future.

Opposite – Self-Portrait, 1986

Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2016

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California 90069

www.mbart.com