Kourtney Roy, The Other End of the Rainbow, 2022

From October 2017 to September 2019, Kourtney Roy made five journeys to the region around Highway 16 in Northern British Columbia, Canada. This infamous stretch of highway is known as the Highway of Tears due to the inordinate number of women and girls, most of them of First Nations descent, who have gone missing or been murdered along its length, totaling over 40 cases since 1969. The artist’s book The Other End of The Rainbow presents the photographer’s subjective photographic experience as that of an anonymous traveler in the region, combined with three distinct texts throughout. The first presents those facts—names, dates, places, etc.—readily available from online media and other sources concerning the disappearances and murders. The second text is comprised of various excerpts from a journal kept by the artist while on the road, dotted throughout the book at different places and variously mundane or anecdotal. What strikes her with hindsight is the sense that, as a lone female traveler, Kourtney Roy was a potential victim herself. The third textual voice is made up of excerpts of recorded conversations with local people she met throughout the region, all of whom had direct connections with the tragic events of the highway. Often these encounters were the products of chance, which highlighted the pervasiveness of the highway’s violence. There is a raw, cathartic quality to these testimonies, as if, by agreeing to be interviewed, these people purged themselves of an unenviable burden. As a Canadian artist who normally specializes in the creation of fictional worlds, the photographer felt it was important to focus on a present-day situation of an often-ignored national tragedy with deep roots in colonization, racism, and misogyny. Kourtney Roy wanted to render a subjective and artistic interpretation of her journeys to the region to highlight an outsider’s experience of such a complex place. The banality of the sites photographed both hides and hints at the presence of sinister events. These fragments capture unintentional details and imbue the places with a sense of disquiet, and their mundane qualities are magnified through the highway’s dark past, adding a sense of dread to the otherwise indifferent landscape.