L'âme de la ville / Nouveaux regards de Sophie Roy

The Napoleon-Bourassa Exhibition Center is proud to present L’âme de la ville / Nouveaux regards (The Soul of the City / New Perspectives), an exhibition by artist Sophie Roy, from August 23 to November 9, 2025. The public is cordially invited to the opening on Saturday, August 23, at 2 p.m., in the presence of the artist, who will speak at 2:30 p.m. to comment on her approach.

This exhibition brings together two distinct but complementary photographic series. Adopting a digital photomontage approach in which she juxtaposes, merges, and transforms photographs from different eras and sources, Sophie Roy offers a poetic reflection on our relationship to the world, the city, and the landscape.

In the series L’âme de la ville (The Soul of the City), the artist explores the tensions that arise between rootedness and mobility, permanence and transformation. Drawing inspiration from the thoughts of Simone Weil and Heraclitus, among others, she focuses on the city as a place that is both fluid and symbolic: neighborhoods, heritage, places of memory. By manipulating archival and contemporary photographs, she composes evocative images that reveal a dynamic and metaphorical vision of the urban environment.

The New Perspectives series, meanwhile, presents unprecedented landscapes where reality and imagination merge. Through a play of superimpositions, transparencies, and digital transformations, Sophie Roy questions our contemporary relationship with nature—sometimes extractive, sometimes a source of hope and renewal. These works open the way to reflection on the ecological crisis, while suggesting humanity's capacity to rethink the ways in which we inhabit and understand the world.

The exhibition highlights the unique universe of Sophie Roy, whose practice combines photography, archives, and digital manipulation to create works that are at once sensitive, critical, and poetic. It invites us to rethink the links between past and present, territory and memory, reality and fiction.