Marina Roy: Mal de mer

The Libby Lesghold Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of Marina Roy’s video Mal de Mer, as part of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program for Emily Carr University’s urban screen. The screening will commence on March 2, 2020 and run until July 2020.

Over the course of one year, Roy dropped a GoPro camera into the water under the Sturdies Bay dock on Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. The camera captures a shifting underwater Salish seascape—life forms changing in accordance with the seasons, currents, and fluctuations in marine life cycles. The camera’s point of view is imagined as that of a sea creature swimming through this habitat. The accompanying text represents the “inner voice” of the creature, from its emergence into consciousness to its anticipation of an imminent death from toxicity. The initial impetus of the work was to provide a meditation on the fragility of the world’s oceans due to humans’ reckless disposal of chemical wastes. However, the ocean appears marvelous and abundant in life, despite the looming human presence in the form of creosoted pilings, the underside of the dock and a boat, abandoned traps, and so on. What is captured on video is sea life having adapted to human industry—a kind of eco-romantic ruin. 

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. She works across a variety of media — drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and animation. Her artwork investigates the grotesque at the intersection of language, image, and materiality; and her research interests include ecology, post humanism, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published Sign After the X (Arsenal/Artspeak); her newest book Queuejumping (Information Office) will come out in October 2020. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award.

The urban screen, located on the north-east wall of the Wilson Arts Plaza, is an initiative of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program in conjunction with the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. To date, the program has included the work of Barry Doupé and Dana Claxton. The screen operates daily from 8am–9pm.

The Libby Leshgold Gallery respectfully acknowledges that we are located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.