Catriona Jeffries is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Raymond Boisjoly (b. 1981, Langley, BC, lives and works in Vancouver). Presenting a new body of photographic works titled Intervals, these large scale images continue his investigation of the fugitive nature of photographic mediums through a process of rupture. Singular images are both captured and released, thus revealing the photographs ability to generate meaning from their own striations of information beyond the primacy of their surface.
The photographs which comprise Intervals are concerned with technological mediation, the relation of photography to time and how the political dimension of cultural practice is expressed, artistically or otherwise. Created through the use of existing video as material in the production of static images, Boisjoly has selected a trio of televised performances retrieved from Youtube by the musicians Pat & Lolly Vegas (Write Me, Baby, 1965), Buffy Sainte-Marie, (He’s A Keeper Of The Fire, 1969) and Sly & the Family Stone (Thank you, 1970). Each of these videos was played on simple video playback technology placed on a flatbed scanner. During this process the scanner registered the video in motion, creating a distorted and disfigured image where edits become compact fields of information and RGB pulls and drips through recognizable fragments of the original material.
The circumstances of these images and the material context of their production also become visible in the form of dust, fingerprints and scratches on the surfaces of the technological components used. The resulting surface expresses the various filters through which the image has been pulled and recalls the process of Richard Hamilton’s Kent State photographs of 1970 where the artist photographed news images directly off of a television in order to transform an image without the insertion of his own subjective hand. Boisjoly’s works similarly express the relentless flow of substance latently present within images and engages a mode that allows the photograph to surrender to the complexity of the cultural material it represents.
