LIFE IS A TOOL LIKE ANY OTHER
Samuel Roy-Bois
Musée d’art de Joliette
Joliette, Québec
June 18 to September 5, 2022
Curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre and Charo Neville
Curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d’art de Joliette, and Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Québec artist Samuel Roy-Bois, who has lived in British Columbia for the past 15years, presents select projects from two independent bodies of work. First exhibited at the Kamloops Art Gallery in 2019, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (2016–2019) is a series of photographic sculptures Roy-Bois made from things he found on a property in Germany in 2016, during an artist residency at Künstlerhaus Worpswede. Realized with the help of his children, who balanced the found objects and then quickly disappeared from the camera lens, this series presents momentary, precariously composed sculptures that exist only long enough to be documented. Suspended for the brief opening of the camera shutter, the sculptures are only experienced by the viewer through the photographs. As improvisational and incidental photographic sculptures, they push up against our understanding of temporality and the certainty of concrete existence.
The Origin of the Family series questions our contemporary material knowledge by interrogating our relationship to things, property, and ownership. Shown alongside a recent sculptural project, these photographs of momentary sculptures destabilize our understanding of both mediums and shift our understanding of ordinary things and spaces as a strategy to examine our bodily relationship with material objects and their visual representation.
The images prove that these assemblages, as ephemeral as they are and almost performance-like in their execution, did in fact occur. Strangely, they appear more real and irrefutable than the reality they manifest. Roy-Bois’ most recent sculptures—either hand-carved or formed by connecting objects he finds in his studio or in his immediate environment—elevate otherwise banal materials to the status of artworks capable of generating an esthetic experience.
The Kamloops Art Gallery presented the exhibition Samuel Roy-Bois: Presences in 2019. This exhibition included The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (2016–2019) photographs along with a group of sculptures and site-specific works. Presences toured to Esker Foundation, Calgary, Alberta, in 2020.
Samuel Roy-Bois
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 2016-2019
chromogenic prints