Samuel Roy-Bois’s exhibition, Steam Donkey, is a site-specific installation currently on view at the Campbell River Art Gallery, and he will be hosting a discussion about it – along with the rest of his body of work as well as his process – tomorrow (Oct. 22) at 1 p.m.
Steam Donkey features found and constructed objects to explore the value of material goods in relation to their orientation in space.
Samuel Roy-Bois is originally from Quebec City and is currently a Vancouver and Kelowna-based installation artist who builds environments that evoke complex notions of presence, absence, denial and longing. His art provokes questions about divisions between institutional, artistic and exhibition spaces—for instance, “what and who is invited into and kept out of each space?” Sometimes, his ambiguous constructions simultaneously invite and block audience participation.
The Artist Talk will look at Roy-Bois’s portfolio, providing further context to the concepts and means of production that has lead to the current exhibition at the Campbell River Art Gallery.
Roy-Bois has received national and international recognition for his practice, including the 2013 work Not a new world, just an old trick at Simon Fraser University Gallery in Burnaby, which is a large-scale model that viewers are invited to enter, whereupon they encounter works from the university’s permanent collection. This installation conjures both domestic and institutionalized space. Other projects include I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance, which constructed a free private living space for a stranger at Vancouver’s Artspeak in 2012.
Roy-Bois’s art has also been exhibited at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among other venues. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan.