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\, psychoanal ysis\, 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 un finished palace Nero had started in 64 AD but which was buried after his de ath 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 t hrough literature and found imagery to uncover and reconstruct a metaphoric al network of unconscious corridors and rooms\, hinting at the many ways ci vilization has reconfigured bios to political ends. The work points to how repressed desire and trauma always find a way back through the window\, jus t as ‘nature’ finds ways of reasserting itself despite human/cultural contr ol.
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 wor k strives to create an allegorical visual language that reveals the ideolog ical structures that bind us. The foundations of her research are in psycho analysis\, biopolitics\, human-animal distinction\, linguistics\, and art h istory. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award. In 2001 she publis hed sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp)\, an encyclopedic book which r evolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings in Western culture. S he is currently researching and writing a new book about human-animal disti nction\, biopolitics\, and the letter Q\, titled Queuejumping. Marina Roy i s associate professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History\, Vis ual Art\, and Theory\, at the University of British Columbia.
What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window marks the first exhibitio n in the Or Gallery’s new Berlin satellite space\, Or Gallery Berlin.
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