Henry Roy blends dream, observation, imagination, and poetic resistance in a career survey spanning four decades.
Loose Joints is proud to present the first monograph exploring forty years of innovative Franco-Haitian artist Henry Roy's sublime photographic practice. Published in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Impossible Island brings together photography, text, and video to immerse readers in Roy's world of interconnected dreams, where time, place, and memory flow together.
Roy’s works, spanning his native Haiti, France, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand, Tunisia, and beyond, build a photographic worldview influenced by French modernism, New Wave aesthetics, creolisation, and Haitian spiralisme. Through his sun-kissed style and animistic sensibility, Roy grants agency to all forms of life, creating transcendent moments that transcend time and place. His images evoke layered narratives that reject imperialist frameworks, inviting viewers to linger, embrace wonder, and explore the boundaries of the visible, rich with poetic and philosophical depth.
Impossible Island delicately sequences Roy's career of refined images into a kind of open-ended story- telling, accompanied by evocative, poetic texts by the artist and an essay by curator Robert Cook to redefine as a relational and transformative force, offering an enduring vision of interconnectedness and renewal.
160 pages, 22 x 25 cm, hardcover, Loose Joints (Marseille) x Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth).