Catriona Jeffries

Raymond Boisjoly’s practice operates as active speculation. Through text and graphic presentation his work reveals the provisional character of knowledge. More specifically, his work engages with the mediated representation of Aboriginality. His processes consider not only technology but also transmission (the space between sender and receiver). For example, his series entitled The Writing Lesson renders First Nations place names—Toronto, Chilliwack, Spuzzum, Masset—in black metal typography. Appearing as decorative abstraction, the visually recuperated texts foreground Aboriginal languages within a discourse of text-based strategies in contemporary art. In the near illegibility of the texts, Boisjoly approaches specific cultural belief systems while signalling their parallel near invisibility in our contemporary society.

Concerned with the process of image production and dealing directly with materiality, Boisjoly’s works in (And) Other Echoes function at the threshold of visibility. Continuing the artist’s examination into technological mediation and its capture of cultural and political intervals, the work takes the 1961 film The Exiles as a source material. The Exiles documents one night in the lives of young Aboriginal men and women living in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Based on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows the transplants (from Southwest reservations) through their social networks and through the city.

Boisjoly scans the moving image to obtain still images that register indexically. His process creates a digital image that abstracts and distorts the movement of the playing video (on an iPhone or iPad). These scans are facemounted to a smokey acrylic, merging the surface and image. The titles of these new works are parallel texts rather than commentary, and as Victor Burgin has noted the space between the image and the text is where something “happens”. It is this space between that Boisjoly engages with.

Raymond Boisjoly (b. 1981, Langley, BC) lives and works in Vancouver. His work has been exhibited in Vancouver at Presentation House Gallery, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Centre A and Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as at Toronto’s The Power Plant and Western Bridge in Seattle.