Michelle Marie Roy

Rose

When the F-blog invited me to exhibit a few photographs on the site, I was more than pleased! I wasn’t sure what to show. So I thought of exhibiting a few self-portraits which are typical for some of my older work, and then also some photos from 2 exhibitions I have been working on for Pride, together with artists Cecilia Bivald and Kim Rosendahl. Both exhibitions open this Saturday, July 25th at the Art Concept Stores.

Mirror

Usually my work is rather subjective, often dealing with gender. In my past work, I have frequently used myself as a model, and self-portraits were a way for me to comment on the phase of my life I was going through at the time of the portrait, but also, collectively speaking, self-portraits were a way for me to explore my identity.

Vagina Face III

“The Baby Doll Mythos” series is a good example of this. The work entitled “Vagina Face III” is a self-portrait where I have used red lipstick and face paint to create a vagina face mask. Basically the idea was to make the viewer aware of how I felt about my identity and gender, and how this effected other people’s perception and reaction to me. Sometimes being a woman felt like a burden. I will show this piece at the “Vagina Dentata” exhibition at Art Concept Store. The concept of the exhibition was inspired by “Vagina Face III” So we sent out a call for vagina art work to create the exhibition. We wanted to see how other women (and even men) felt about gender and about female sexuality. And the response was amazing! We received a great deal of high quality work in a variety of media!


Be My Sugar Daddy

Cecilia, Kim and I also wanted to do a photo/video based project entitled “Team: Sexualitet” for Pride. Basically we handed out 10 disposable cameras to people of various sexual orientations, from straight to gay to trans-gender, and asked them to document their sexuality. My contribution to the exhibition has been taking black and white portraits of the participants. This was a challenge for me, because it deviated so much from my usual working process. I usually have an image in my mind that I have to create in the “real world” and then photograph. With the “Tema: Sexualitet” portraits, the challenge was to capture the personality and energy of each individual. So instead of photographing what is internal, I had to turn the camera to the external world.


Miranda & Hanna

The photograph of “Miranda & Hannah” is one of my favorites from the exhibition. Miranda is from Finland and Hannah is Swedish. They met online and the rest is history. During the photo shoot they seemed to be very much in love. They both had such free and easy spirits. I realized how much they must care for one another, and I think it shows in the portrait.

Cake

For more information about my work, you are welcome to visit my website at: www.michellemarieroy.com I will also be at the openings on July 25th from 12 – 18:00 at the Art Concept Stores: www.artconceptstore.se

Strange Fruit

Invited by Jan Buse