Marina Roy: What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window


DATE
Saturday December 4, 2010

Exhibition runs to February 26, 2011. Or satellite gallery, Berlin, Germany

Marina Roy’s exhibition What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window sets up an arena of discursive activity between human, animal, myth, psychoanalysis, literature, and biopolitics. The artworks—two and three dimensional works as well as moving image—cull their inspiration from the grotesque, a stylistic term that comes from the Latin grotto, meaning small cave. The original caves were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, an unfinished palace Nero had started in 64 AD but which was buried after his death and then forgotten over fifteen centuries before they were rediscovered. The walls of the rooms were covered in a decorative interweaving of plant, animal, human and mineral imagery. One of Roy’s approaches is to sift through literature and found imagery to uncover and reconstruct a metaphorical network of unconscious corridors and rooms, hinting at the many ways civilization has reconfigured bios to political ends. The work points to how repressed desire and trauma always find a way back through the window, just as ‘nature’ finds ways of reasserting itself despite human/cultural control.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist who works across a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, animation, sculpture, and writing. She has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, Europe and India. Incorporating raw and found materials, image and text, her work strives to create an allegorical visual language that reveals the ideological structures that bind us. The foundations of her research are in psychoanalysis, biopolitics, human-animal distinction, linguistics, and art history. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp), an encyclopedic book which revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings in Western culture. She is currently researching and writing a new book about human-animal distinction, biopolitics, and the letter Q, titled Queuejumping. Marina Roy is associate professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, at the University of British Columbia.

What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window marks the first exhibition in the Or Gallery’s new Berlin satellite space, Or Gallery Berlin.

T. +1 604.683.7395
E. berlin @ orgallery.org

Gallery hours 12 – 5PM
Saturdays or by appointment



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