Marina Roy
Your Kingdom to Command (detail), 2016
Latex paint, bitumen on plywood. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo, Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery.
Join us for the final day of our current exhibition zero, ground, for a set of performative lectures by local artists, Randy Lee Cutler and Marina Roy.
While the primary concerns of the exhibition pivot around figure-ground relations and the potential of blackness as a formal negation, Cutler and Roy will approach these theoretical ideas in a literal sense by considering two potent black substances found in the ground. Coal and petroleum products, as cultural and environmental ciphers, collapse discreet disciplinary knowledge into new arrangements, informing the ways in which their raw materiality is transformed into a resource, a commodity and an inspiration for art making. A creative and destructive force, they are powerful and troubling symbols of energy, waste and transformation.– Randy Lee Cutler
Cutler and Roy will each present their recent bodies of research into coal and petroleum products respectively, incorporating responses to the exhibition into their performative talks.
Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. Through the intersections of gender, art, science and technology Cutler investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. Cutler maintains a collaborative research practice that is engaged with the intersections of materiality storytelling and magic. Her 2016 multi platform project SaltWalks: Three Movements included a series of walks and a video in which she explored the enduring relationship civilizations have had with salt, from its importance in food preservation and healing to more aesthetic and philosophical implications.
Cutler is a Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in the Faculty of Art. In addition to her performance and video work, she contributes essays to catalogues and magazines while maintaining an experimental relationship to pedagogy, hospitality and embodiment.
Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist whose research practice investigates materiality, ecology, post-humanism and psychoanalysis. Working across a variety of media, Roy creates visual languages in which human, animal, plant, mineral and microbial life coalesce into new formations, challenging the way nature is conceptualised in industrialized cultures. In 2016, she completed a temporary public installation for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite location which broached ecological issues through the use of tar, bitumen and plastics.
Roy has participated in exhibitions across Canada, as well as in Europe, India and the US, and was the recipient of the VIVA Award in 2010. She is Associate Professor of visual arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.