An artist of Haida and Québécois decent, Raymond Boisjoly uses print-based, sculptural media, and installation strategies to engage issues of Aboriginality, language and materiality. Boisjoly frames these issues through varied transformative processes such as resignification, translation, and decay.

His use of common materials emphasizes their potential to gesture beyond themselves to an experience that does not belong to art alone. Expanding Fields, 2008, resignfies traditional totem poles and Christmas lights. The sculpture is made with everyday plywood, a material symbolizing both industry and displacement in the Northwest; its features outlined by a colorful, complicated symbol of quasi-spirituality and a commerce co-opted holiday.

Boisjoly’s work also explores the experience of language through its diverse material manifestations. By stressing the technological means by which works have been produced and the contingencies that transform them, his work negotiates the often-unobserved relationship of a text to its physical carrier.

The Spirit of Inconstancy includes a new text-based piece from a project he began earlier this year. The Writing Lesson: Seattle, 2011, features the word Seattle, referencing the city named after Duwamish Chief Seattle.

The Writing Lesson makes reference to the visual typography of the heavy metal subgenre knows as black metal in creating a vernacular mode of writing to illustrate place names in Western Canada and Washington with indigenous origins. Early iterations of black metal music created in Norway sought to resurrect aspects of indigenous pre-Christian spirituality that had been violently displaced in the Christianization of Scandinavia by acts such as the destruction of pagan temples. Through a rudimentary photographic process using a hand cut stencil, the light of the sun has burned the names of places such as Masset, Skidegate, Chilliwack, and Yakima onto black paper with the hope that more will be revealed than concealed. The Writing Lesson wishes to foreground language as a cultural practice and bring a concern for Aboriginal languages to bear on text-based strategies in art. 

- Raymond Boisjoly

About the artist

Raymond Boisjoly is an Aboriginal artist from Chilliwack now based in Vancouver, B.C. He received his BFA from Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver in 2006 and his MFA from University of British Columbia, Vancouver in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include, The Writing Lesson at Republic Gallery (Vancouver, B.C.), The Ever-Changing Light at Access Gallery (Vancouver, B.C.), and Exercises in Seeing at Queen’s Nail Project (San Francisco, CA). Boisjoly has participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects including How Soon Is Now at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Studies in Decay at OR Gallery (Vancouver, B.C.), and All Things Equal at the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University. He has been awarded a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre in 2010 and participated in the thematic residency La Commune. The Asylum. Die Bühne. at the Banff Centre in 2011. This is Boisjoly’s first exhibition at Lawrimore Project.