Raymond Boisjoly
The work of Raymond Boisjoly (b. 1981, Langley, Canada; lives/works: Vancouver) is derived from his training in photography. He uses screens, scanners, photocopiers, and inkjet printers to capture technological processes interwoven with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins. For example, the artist has placed a tablet playing moving images on a flat-bed scanner to capture the technological process, broken in the suspension of the scan into its primary colours of red, green, and blue. Here he plays with the dance between two machines to create a kind of electronic vocabulary of abstraction.
Regarding Boisjoly’s use of culturally-specific and loaded imagery, art historian Tom McDonough notes that the artist “read[s] the progressive act of aesthetic displacement through the lens of the cultural annexation of the other, and vice versa.” For example, in from age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled… (2015), he appropriates his title from a translated line from Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Statues Also Die (1953) and presents images of African sculptures similarly mediated and abstracted through his artistic process.
Raymond Boisjoly’s solo exhibitions include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2021); The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2020); VOX, Montreal (2016); Carleton University, Ottawa (2015); Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg (2014); Simon Fraser University Gallery, Vancouver (2013). He has been featured internationally in exhibitions including at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2021); Honolulu Biennial (2020); Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea (2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2017); Triangle France, Marseille (2015); SITElines, Santa Fe (2014); Camera Austria, Vienna (2014) as well as exhibitions at La Biennale de Montréal (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018, 2016 and 2012-14).
Boisjoly is Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University. He received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). He was a recipient of the VIVA Award (2016), presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver.