© Joseph Jeremie Roy
Red Wall Gallery - School of the Photographic Arts 168 Dalhousie Street K1N 7C4 Ottawa Canada
Photo-based artist Joseph Jeremie Roy continues his exploration of memory, memento mori, and the narrative possibilities of the constructed image in this new collection of unique photographic objects.
The works in Fish Permutations tell stories, make political statements, elicit questions, suggest answers, and just as often, invite smiles of ridicule and doubt. The fish is the recurrent motif threading its way through the collection of platinum and palladium and gelatin silver contact prints. Roy’s works express the themes of resurrection and mortality from the twin perspectives of content and production, while their size from ultra large to extra small shows the artist’s struggle with the implications of scale and presentation in contemporary photographic practice.
Roy has evolved his modus operandi to include input on every part of the photographic process from production to presentation. He has used only light and chemical photographic processes to capture and produce images with large format film, ultra large paper negatives, and handmade ultra large format glass plate negatives. Some of the first images from the Mola, an ultra large format camera hand-built by the artist, are included in this exhibition.
© Joseph Jeremie Roy
The collected images being shown have been arranged and rearranged, interpreted and reinterpreted into permutations that have grown exponentially with their numbers. While the principle elements of the set have remained consistent it is their order that give them meaning.
The Red Wall Gallery is located in SPAO at 168 Dalhousie, at the corner of Bruyère, in the Byward Market.