Sophie le Roux is a texturally fascinated Marsh dweller.
Her photography is almost entirely preoccupied by texture, colour, and chance. She frequently uses expired film to produce unpredictable, aleatory pictures, and is fascinated by the accidents that occur at the beginning and end of the roll: a counterintuitive blaze of colour, an elegant chaos of shapes. The camera is encouraged to create something new out of what she’s pointed it at, so that the final result seems to merge the external world with an interior imagination: a photograph captured in the act of capturing itself. The unusual is discovered inside the usual.
In her street series, le Roux travels across Europe to find neglected corners of cities and landscapes, and uplift the accidental art of decay and graffiti. In a painterly style, she re-appropriates detritus and anonymous passers-by alike into highly composed and colour-saturated still-lives. Significance, beauty, individuality is found where it is least supposed to be – in the margins of the endless urban narrative. These ‘found’ moments are typically off-beat, unexceptional, but imbued by her gaze with a new, richer emotion, that’s somehow both intimately melancholic and at a remove.
Throughout her work, there is a consistency of approach that is not content simply to reveal secret realities, but to enhance them. She wants more from the world, and so lets you see it twice: in what unexpected moment has been captured, and again, in how the moment has been captured by the fickle medium of denatured film.
Text by Jonathan Lyon
Portrait by Maïté Moloney
2021 + Upcoming
09.21 Printed in Glasgow-based Concrete Nature's publication Out of Office
07.21 EELLS Clothing Collection / Assemble for Memory/ launches (photographer)
29.06.21 Sunset Music Video release for Laura Groves - (animator)
12.06.21 - 08.21 Exhibition at Restaurant GILVIC, Shoreditch
21.04.21 Stille Music Video release for Albertine Sarges
2020
26.11.20 'I Am Afraid' Video Edit for Jenny Moore's Mystic Business premiered on Lost Map Records and Get in Her Ears
04.11.20 Rapid Response & Restitution: LagosPhoto 20 Home Museum, Digital Exhibition
05.10.20 Infinite Wisdom Video release for Laura Groves
10.08.20 - 16.08.20 - Sweet Microverse on Art Connect's Favourite Projects
08.20 Joined Piezā, international print selling platform, Amsterdam.
7.08.20 - 14.08.20 - Art at The Anchor // Group Exhibition, Suffolk
22.04.20 Visuals for Merlin Nova's Live Set at Cafe OTO (Supporting MSHR) - POSTPONED
22.03.20 Electric Acoustic: Mortal Oil #3, St Giles Church, London (curator) - POSTPONED
03.20 Emulsions (duo show with Milla Lewis), Safehouse 1, London
01.20 Electric Acoustic: Mortal Oil #2, Strange Parade, Nunhead, London (curator)
2019
Electric Acoustic: Mortal Oil Strange Parade, London (curator)
Exposure AIR Gallery, Altrincham
100 The Steamship Project Space, London
Cutting Corners: Exhibition & Live Art (curator) Arch 504, London
Guttural Living, Ebor Studio, Littleborough (supporting documentation for residency by Kerri Jefferis and Sophie Chapman)
Touch Me - Being a Citizen in The Digital Age Strasbourg Bienalle (Film installation)
2018
Kickass (Wo)men Alte Münze, Berlin
FU Review LOOPS Ex-Girlfriend Gallery, Berlin
A Commentary on Productivity, BMHW, Berlin
On a Wing and a Prayer, No.1 Harbourside Gallery, Bristol
The Whole Is Other (Than The Sum of Its Parts) , ONCA Gallery, Brighton
Showboat, The Steamship Project Space, London
The Museum of Lies, FKK Galerie, Berlin
The Palace Meets Berlin Exhibition + Fasching Feast, Am Flutgraben, Berlin
Still There, ONCA Gallery, Brighton
2015 - 2017
Puderpink, Puderraum Galerie, Berlin (co-curator)
The Blind Curator, FKK Galerie, Berlin
The Peace Process, The Peace Process, Berlin
Roulade Magazine Launch, Husk London
Publications + Features
Transgressive Records
GROUND Magazine
Hunger Magazine
White Lies
Roulade Magazine
The Daily Telegraph
Noisey Netherlands
Exberliner
The Commission Magazine
Femmeuary
The 405
About Time
The British Journal of Photography
Hereyouare
The Chop
Rolling Stone Italia
Lola
A42D
Wespert
Get in Her Ears
Lost Map Records
AQNB
We Make $$$ney Not Art
Soft Eis
Kyiv Maps
The State of The Arts
Slowdance Records
Künstler, Künstlerin
The Line of Best Fit
Clash Magazine
Concrete Nature
Instagram: @sopfhe
Contact: sophieisleroux@gmail.com
See also: www.sophielerouxdocu.com
Based between London and Suffolk, UK