Kourtney Roy: The Tourist

“The Tourist” contains all the Roy signatures we’ve come to expect: self-portraiture, a cinematic approach, her distinct colour palette, and that uneasy dance between the glamorous and the grimy, the familiar and the unsettling. Fantasy and reality blur—as always—but here, Roy takes it further, crafting with precision the moment we exit the extensional world and enter her intensional one.

She constructs a visual metaphor for a world we think we know. But through clever juxtapositions—a snorkelling mask paired with a cigarette, fluffy slippers dangerously near the pool’s edge, or a mop resting beside a fake temple—we realise we’re not quite where we thought. The details both anchor and disturb us. These images are recognisable, yet never quite real.

Roy captures something fundamental about the contemporary holiday. Research suggests we enjoy the anticipation and the memory of travel more than the trip itself. The holiday snapshot becomes essential—a glossy edit of moments never fully lived. Roy subverts this ritual. Her glamorous settings are tinged with discomfort, mirroring the hollowness we often deny.

In “The Tourist”, Roy invites us into a world that looks like leisure but feels like something else entirely—a performance of pleasure in which the cracks are always showing.