Marie-Josée Roy

Born in Trois-Rivières, Québec and educated at the University of Québec, Marie-Josée Roy established herself in the Canadian cultural landscape after first gaining popularity within Montreal’s underground art scene.  Roy works as both a painter and sculptor, employing metal as her primary material.  She has focused her artistic approach on breathing life into this otherwise defunct medium.

Working as both a painter and sculptor, Roy seeks to express and contemplate the complex duality present in each of us.  Her work shows scenes of masculine and feminine, strength and vulnerability, growth and decay, whimsy and pain, even fear and transcendence.  Using heat and fire, Roy’s pieces tell stories that embrace the fantastic, folklore, and dreamlike imagery of characters in transition: bodies who exist somewhere between the human form and foliage.

Roy’s latest body of work, “Clair-Obscur” speaks to childhood, its purity, its troubles, and finally, how our upbringing and roots stay with us and alter our present-day realities. She delves deep into her own subconscious mind to pull out experiences from her past, a process which is always hard and never leaves its partakers unscathed. As a visual representation of this conception, Marie-Josée Roy carves out the body, quite literally, by way of either the forging process, or through the layers of paint that overlay her figures.