SAMUEL ROY-BOIS: PRESENCES

Originally from Québec City, Québec, Samuel Roy-Bois is based in the Okanagan region of British Columbia, where he is Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus and heads an interdisciplinary lab for creative exchange called The Research Studio for Spaces and Things.

Samuel Roy-Bois’ practice is concerned with the conceptual and material definition of space and the ways the built environment and manufactured things contribute to our understanding of the world. Through sculpture, site-specific installation, and photography, Roy-Bois examines relational networks of objects and their complex philosophical considerations.

This full-colour monograph was produced in partnership with Esker Foundation following presentations of Samuel Roy-Bois’ exhibition Presences, which was organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery in 2019 and toured to Esker Foundation in Calgary, Alberta, in 2020. Texts in English and French by Samuel Roy-Bois, Octave Debary, and Helga Pakasaar expand on the artist’s philosophical explorations and the intersections of photography and sculpture.

Reflecting the repurposing of everyday materials in Roy-Bois’ work, this publication is hand-bound with colourful inside pages unique to  each book. TagTeam Studio in Montréal, Québec, created a printing and assembly system that allowed for the maximum usage of excess paper available to them and assembled each book block with coloured booklets by hand. The paper combinations create a rhythm for the content that varies in each book. Twenty-six unique book covers were created from a catalog of discontinued book cloths from La Parchemine, a now closed 53-year-old Montréal bookshop. The designers assigned each hand-assembled book block to a book cloth, which were hand-stitched and assembled by Atelier aux mille et une feuilles, resulting in 250 unique copies of this publication.

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Kamloops Art Gallery, 2022