Catriona Jeffries

Raymond Boisjoly works with text, photography, and images to contemplate modes of transmission and consider how language, culture, and ideas can be mediated, framed, or received. A Vancouver-based artist of Haida and Quebecois descent, Boisjoly expands on the Vancouver School’s post-conceptual photographic practices while attending to complex negotiations of Indigeneity in the context of colonialism. Interested in the ways that both images and language can break, distort, falter, or fail, Boisjoly draws on, and bends, vernacular conventions in language, photography, and fabrication. His works often interrogate their own place in the realm of fine art through the use of unconventional or rudimentary printing mediums (nylon tarp, sign-maker’s vinyl, office paper, or beer cans) and openly draw from popular culture or academic texts as raw material.

For his first solo museum presentation in the United States, Boisjoly presents new works suggestive of 3-D imaging alongside recent related pieces that provoke an ambiguity and tension between text and image. In a large-scale mural executed on site, the artist abrades a beer can on the wall to render wavy, distorted text with a graphite-like quality. In this work, Boisjoly refers to complex histories of ritual, and tenders the possibility that a beer can may be a tool for production rather than consumption. The exhibition’s title, The Explanatory Void, alludes to spectral presences like shadows and echoes as well as the sometimes-gaping gulf between language and experience.

Boisjoly’s exhibition is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

A brochure created on the occasion of the exhibition is available here.

Raymond Boisjoly (b. 1981, Langley, British Columbia) lives and works in Vancouver. 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 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 (2018); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018, 2016 and 2012–14). Boisjoly received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). Boisjoly is currently Assistant Professor in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Artist Talk: Raymond Boisjoly, 40 minutes