Kourtney Roy

California – Enter as Fiction

As part of the 10th Moscow International Biennale of Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, MAMM presents ‘California — Enter as Fiction’, a project by Kourtney Roy.
Kourtney Roy was born in Canada and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in the oldest and most respected University of Art and Design named after Emily Carr. She dreamed of becoming an artist, but after completing a photography course found that sometimes it’s easier to take pictures of what you want to paint. At the beginning of her photographic career the search for models to use in shoots caused certain difficulties, so Kourtney Roy easily solved the problem by turning to self-portraits. Now she lives in Paris and has achieved great success in the field of fashion and art photography. She already has no difficulties with the choice of models, but to this day remains true to the genre of self-portrait, creating an amazing series on the verge of fiction and reality, inspired by the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore.
Kourtney Roy loves to travel. In search of unusual stories she found herself in California, which is symbolised of course by Hollywood, the empire of dreams and illusions which is also often called the city of tinsel and deception.
That’s where she had the idea for the series ‘California — Enter as Fiction’. Naturally she herself took the role of the main and only heroine in the project. For two months Kourtney Roy travelled in a car packed with photographic equipment, wigs and secondhand dresses, visiting cities, villages and various abandoned places in search of unprepossessing yet at the same time colourful landscapes. The essence of the project was to find in the everyday and banal something mysterious, disturbing and fascinating.
‘I tried not only to offer another vision of reality, but also to become part of it, to move into a parallel world where ambiguity and strangeness coexist with everyday life. I used the body’s ability for improvisation and gameplaying to achieve the unexpected effect of foreboding in scenes that otherwise seem completely banal. This photographic method relies heavily on the vicissitudes of the case, on the ‘unexpected’ that arises in the process of finding places and situations. The works created in this way look like a series of strange episodes on the verge of reality,’ recalls Kourtney Roy.
All in all, it was necessary to find places with secret potential so they could be transformed into a film set with a wave of the magic wand (Kourtney Roy’s camera). For her part the photographer was always ready to encounter them, armed with a whole suitcase full of objects that seem bizarre at first sight such as a baseball bat, an eagle suit and a rubber chicken.
By her discovery of such surprising places, usually avoiding undue attention from the townsfolk and without provoking their interest in their own everyday life and banality, the photographer transforms them into special worlds, where unusual events unfold and extraordinary heroines are performed by the incredible Kourtney Roy.