Marina Roy

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In June, we welcome Marina Roy to speak on the work of Abbas Akhavan. 

No advance registration required for this event.

### Biography
Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor in visual art at the University of British Columbia. She works across a variety of media— drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and animation. Her artwork investigates the grotesque, at the intersection of language, image, and materiality, and her research interests include ecology, post humanism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published *sign after the x* (Arsenal/Artspeak); her newest book *Queuejumping* (Information Office) will come out later this year. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award.

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Marina Roy on Abbas Akhavan

Saturday Session

We are pleased to announce our third installment of CAG Reads, a book club where artists invite us to read alongside them. Each month an artist proposes a book for our collective reading pleasure, culminating in a virtual hangout where the artist leads a wide-ranging discussion grounded in their chosen reading material. 

This July, CAG Reads will be hosted by artist and educator Marina Roy. Cross-disciplinary in scope, Roy’s work investigates the intersections between materials, history, language, and the grotesque. She is particularly interested in exploring the need for posthuman and nonhuman perspectives. Her work has been exhibited by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Artspeak, Or Gallery, and Will Aballe Art Projects, amongst other venues, and her book *sign after the X* was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2001. Roy is Associate Professor in the department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia. This fall, her new book *Queuejumping* will be released by Information Office. 

For this month’s installment, Roy has chosen the novel *Bina* (2019) by Anakana Schofield. Bina explores aging, illness and male manipulation through its titular character, a 74-year old woman accused of a crime so serious she cannot even talk about it directly. Described by Schofield as a “story told through warnings,” this novel follows Schofield’s award-winning predecessors, *Malarky* (2013) and *Martin John* (2015). 

### Getting the book

For our local participants, an audiobook copy of *Bina* can be found [here](https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/6690623038) through the Vancouver Public Library.

For readers interested in picking up a copy, here in Vancouver both [Massy Books](https://www.massybooks.com/) and [Pulp Fiction](http://pulpfictionbooksvancouver.com/) have reopened and are available to order *Bina* ($14.70 + tax)


A cover of a book titled Anakana Schofield. On a white background, the capital letter b and the small letters: i, n, and a are printed. 

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Marina Roy presents Anakana Schofield

CAG Reads

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer whose recent works combine interests in historical book illustration with psychoanalytic theory and word play. Past works include a series of illustrations the artist crafted on the fore-edges of books, which illustrate the books' titles while making overt sexual puns about their subject matter. 

For her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Roy will present an ambitious series of new paintings using glass and mirrors. In these works, abstract “blobs” of paint are poured onto sheet glass; Roy then creates representational paintings inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrational styles on the reverse side of the painted glass. Arranging a mirror behind the glass, the illustration can be glimpsed hovering behind the monochromatic blob. Parallels with Rorschach tests bring to mind and literalize the often sexual nature of suggestion. 

Several images from the paintings have been used in the accompanying video animation, *Sleeper*. Using kinetic devices such as bodily emissions or expanding clouds, the relationships between background and foreground are blurred or trade places, operating in much the same way as they do in the mirror painting structures. All of the images are figurative and make reference to landscape traditions, exploiting our abiding interest in nature and human nature. 

Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a black and white illustration of a character, whose body looks like a tooth fallen off, standing in a dark background filled with stars.

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Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes are made on the mirrors. Three paintings are mounted on the left wall and a larger painting on the far wall. 

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01-MarinaRoy-2004 .jpeg

Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes are made on the mirrors. Three paintings are mounted on the far wall and a larger painting on the left wall. 

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Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes in black and yellow are made on the mirrors. Three paintings, varying in size, are mounted on the walls.

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Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a black and white photographed image of people closely standing with each other and smiling at the camera. 

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Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a coloured image of two pink circular shapes in motion in a dark blue background filled with stars.

Marina Roy

Exhibitions

Talks & Events