West Coast & Yukon - Raymond Boisjoly
Ideas | CBC | Posted: January 16, 2018 8:56 PM | Last Updated: January 16, 2018
The Sobey Art Award is Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. The annual prize is given to an artist under age 40, who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
- MORE: The 2017 Sobey Art Award
Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist of Haida descent based in Vancouver. His practice concerns the deployment of images, objects and materials in, and as, Indigenous art, using a reflexive approach to foreground the discourses that frame and delimit the work produced by Indigenous artists. Boisjoly has been included in exhibitions and projects at SITE Santa Fe, Triangle France (Marseille), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Vancouver Art Gallery, The Power Plant (Toronto) and Presentation House Gallery (North Vancouver). Boisjoly is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio in the Department of Visual Art and Material Practice at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is represented by Catriona Jeffries.
Sobey Art Award Juror Reid Shier on Raymond Boisjoly
"Raymond Boisjoly explores how cultural identification is connected to artistic identity. His work often restructures ethnographic identities, reconnecting to a cultural specificity previously rendered invisible. As an indigenous artist of Haida and Québécois descent, he takes on the role of critical respondent, moving fluidly between various media, such as photographic prints, installations, collage, murals, video and sculpture. His materials often reflect the artist's adroit interplay between distinct cultural associations and the globalist paradigms of contemporary art. In the series "Rez Gas" for example, Boisjoly compiles an image inventory of all the gas stations on First Nations reserves in British Columbia. In this series, as in much of his work, both the medium and the process emphasize the complex relationship between Indegeniety and place, referencing histories of conceptual art alongside images of early frontier photographers, which often featured First Nations as subjects framed through a categorizing, anthropological lens."