I drink | New Orleans

The series is implacable: one image is all and can be reduced to a fragment. The avatar takes precedence in a unique, unchanging narrative, where the stereotype reigns. Kourtney Roy, photographer, actress and director makes a body, her own, available for a range of little sketches, the backdrop of which is always desolate or banal, places where bad things happen.

We are in New Orleans, a city that has not yet managed to get over Katrina, with its grim neighbourhoods, service stations and bars. Wearing a "disguise',' with no ostentation, a nameless character in a 'mask': features in them, or in fact, lives in them. 'The bar, the karaoke stage or dancefloor house an accepted solitude that family life cannot assuage. Nevertheless, there is purposefully no pathos in the depiction. The "mask" is an obvious lure, and despite changing wigs, the modifications have no effect on the way the narra-tive unfolds, it is necessarily brutal, a lost woman in a counterfeit, illusory world.

What is the aim of this transformation? The provisional modification is intended to create an encounter with one of her potential doubles. The photographer and her character are looking for each other. Here photography reaches its aim: here, without a doubt, they find one another, they identify each other. In the framework of this piece of photographic fiction, the change in appearance is essential, obvious and tragically comic.

But the photographer does not fool us with these kitsch backdrops; of these preposterous wigs and this low-key eroticism there is nothing left but ennui and banality. We do not expect anything else, anything more off-putting, as the photographer, perhaps through empathy, pushes us to act, to put ourselves in the place off the character, the everyday neurotic" that inhabits us all. The title, "I Drink',' is evidence of the character s refusal to look at reality head-on, the subject that struggles to find its place in the world of language. Faced with the overdose of the world's meanings, emptiness is the only option. Everyday life is a used-up photographic material that can no longer be approached without an ironic lightness.

The illusion contributes to the balance. The artificial nature of photography is but the metaphor of the artificiality of existence. These images are not here merely to confound or amuse the viewer. They relate the viewer to the work of the imagination, which, in the end, is the medium's sole function.

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-text by Francois Cheval, Co-director of Lianzhou Museum of Photography

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