News and Features
Samuel Roy-Bois: From Private Life to Public Art
By Myriam Lacroix published Jun 25, 2012
With playful installations, the Montreal artist smashes our tenuous sense of privacy.
In late February, Samuel Roy-Bois gave a packed-room talk at Simon Fraser University. Tall, slim, and handsome, the Montreal artist kept the crowd hanging off his every charmingly accented word for exactly 60 minutes, after which he left on an enigmatic note: "For obvious reasons, I will not be answering any questions."
The following week, at Langara College on West 49th, I see two men chatting by the room-sized Plexiglas cube that is Roy-Bois's new installation, Nothing Blank Forever. One, with curly hair and deep olive skin, walks over. A cold wind is whipping between us; dark clouds threaten overhead. The man introduces himself as Samuel Roy-Bois. I stare back, puzzled. "You've changed quite a bit since Saturday."
He laughs. "Oh, you thought that was me?" He explains that he hired an actor to speak for him at SFU. "I like to think that those artist talks are just a continuation of the work, that there's no real ‘take the mask down' kind of thing," he explains. "I wrote the talk like a play, an hourlong monologue with my work as the structural element."
We enter Nothing Blank Forever, and a gust makes the walls creak. "It was really windy on Saturday. I started to worry that it wouldn't stay up." Roy-Bois, who is 38 but appears much younger, points out little pencil marks on the wooden ceiling, the way screws are placed to remain visible. He likes to do the construction himself, to make sure evidence of the process is not erased. "All those little things that build up the story."
His built-up stories have been shown at Point Ephémère in Paris, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, and, in Vancouver, at the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Republic Gallery, the Or, and, most recently, the Artspeak. His work tends to be concerned with architecture and the built environment-the way that spaces are lived in and understood.
