Intricately layered frescoes that capture the fragmented views of urban life
By Andrew Burlone
August 7, 2025
Until August 31, 2025, Geneviève Roy’s Habitats imaginaires invites viewers into a thought-provoking exploration of space, identity, and transformation. The exhibition, which opened with a reception on August 3, unfolds in four distinct chapters—dioramas, pavilions, Interior Works in Progress, and Imaginary Cities—each crafted through diverse techniques that collectively create a multifaceted reflection on how we construct and inhabit our environments.
Habitats imaginaires is a compelling journey through the mutable spaces of our lives. It beautifully balances authenticity with poetic mystery and offers fresh perspectives on how we perceive and inhabit the world around us.
Roy’s work centres around the evocative metaphor of construction sites—a symbol of incompletion, flux, and constant change. These sites resonate on two levels: as tangible urban spaces that anchor us physically in the world, and as internal landscapes reflecting our personal growth and emotional development. This duality offers visitors a unique lens to consider the spaces they occupy and their ongoing inner construction. Through digital, three-dimensional, and pictorial pieces, Roy presents layered visual narratives that resemble intricately layered frescoes that capture the fragmented and multifaceted perspectives of city life as a mosaic of intersecting real and imagined territories. This fragmented yet immersive approach invites viewers to engage intellectually and emotionally, encouraging a personal dialogue with the themes of place and selfhood.
Habitats imaginaires is a compelling journey through the mutable spaces of our lives.
Geneviève Roy’s background as an architect and fine arts graduate, combined with her teaching experience and recent Master’s research at UQAM on human-environment relationships, clearly informs the depth and conceptual richness of this body of work. Her international residencies and exhibitions have further shaped a practice that is both globally informed and deeply rooted in local experience.
About Geneviève Roy
Geneviève Roy is an artist originally from Quebec City who now lives and works in Montreal. She has a background in architecture with a Bachelor’s degree from Université Laval, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University.
In 2010, she transitioned from her initial career in architecture to focus on her artistic practice while also teaching interior design at Cégep du Vieux Montréal. She earned a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM in 2023, deepening her research on the relationship between humans and the built environment, especially exploring the physical and psychological spaces of domestic and urban environments with symbolic value.
Roy’s work often addresses themes of space, construction, and transformation, using diverse techniques including digital, three-dimensional, and pictorial media. Her art is known for layering and complexity, inviting viewers to engage with the idea of our lived and imagined environments.
She has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, enabling her to participate in international artist residencies in countries such as Italy, Germany, France, and the United States. Her artworks have been exhibited both solo and in groups across Canada and internationally.
Besides her artistic creation, she combines teaching interior design with ongoing creative research, which enriches the conceptual depth of her work. This background and her active exhibition schedule make Geneviève Roy an influential contemporary artist engaged with exploring the interplay between architecture, urbanity, and personal identity within her multidisciplinary practice.
Galerie d’art contemporain Arts Sutton
7 Academy Street, Sutton, Quebec J0E 2K0
From July 31 to August 31, 2025
Open Thursday to Sunday, from 1 pm. to 5 pm.
info@artssutton.com • 450-538-256
Image: Courtesy of Arts Sutton
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Arts Sutton is a place of encounter and reflection, dedicated to the dissemination and promotion of contemporary visual arts in all their richness and diversity. Arts Sutton[/col][/row]
