Survivalist Failures

When the photographer found herself confined to Normandy during the Coronavirus crisis, her unlimited imagination delivered a photographic series titled Survivalist Failures. Every day, Kourtney Roy came up with an ironic, quirky, and cutting edge survival guide that she posted on social media. Each photograph was accompanied by survival lessons: Lesson 11: In the apocalypse don't forget about personal hygiene.en artists in confinement".

During confinement, our daily life suddenly changed and our standards were turned upside down. For the survivalist movement, everything they had been preparing for for years had happened, a world-wide lockdown. Roy was inspired by it, with her very particular artistic language, and in the manner of survivalists, the artist staged herself in unusual situations, which perhaps reminded her of her childhood spent telling fantastic stories to herself in the Canadian forest.

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The Survivalist Failures series puts us in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, and takes place in the backyard of the photographer's house. In this playground of infinite possibilities, Roy stages herself in self-portraits, which are the common thread of her work, and uses her body to question ideas of representation and identity Through performances between fiction and reality, this series is the offbeat testimony of these weeks that we went through and leaves a trace of this collective experience, a record of an unusual era.

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Roy's work is a clever mix of ambiguity and cinematic images, always on the border between the real and the fantastic. Her photographs push us to question the reality of her compositions, the strangeness of which she subtly reveals to us. The artist plays with our psychological, temporal and spatial perceptions.
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-Yasmine Lavizzari, Director of Air Project Gallery

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