Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present Vancouver-based artist’s Samuel Roy-Bois’ first soloshow with the gallery.
Almost is a collection of Roy-Bois’ axonometric drawings of building structures which he has produced over the past five years. Presented as an organized environment for the first time, Almost becomes “a substitute city” of office towers and apartment of fictitious origins. Using graphite on paper, the highly rigid affirmation of Roy-Bois’ architectural lines evoke our built environment and consequently allude to the nature of our relationship with it. Challenging idealistic states of mind brought forth by utopian propositions, Roy-Bois’ drawings are rooted in the ordinary, banal and imitation and question how much we are living in failed ideals.
The physicality of the drawing process is important in Roy-Bois’ works. The geometry of the simple structures, their formal plans and the utopian ideals from which they arise react against the work’s messiness and failures. Rendered faulty and slightly amiss, beyond the claim of the “handmade” emerges a sense of self-appropriation of one’s immediate landscape.
Samuel Roy-Bois is a multidisciplinary Vancouver-based artist who is also an active musician and performer. A graduate of Laval University and Concordia University (M.F.A.), Roy-Bois originally explored painting before turning to the architectural dimension of installation. Roy-Bois has shown his work across Canada and abroad. Selected shows include: Burrow at Oakville Galleries (2007), Improbable and ridiculous at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2006), Faire l’indépendance at Montréal’s Quartier Éphémère (2005).
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