As It Comes
As It Comes
By Raymond Boisjoly
As it Comes by Raymond Boisjoly appears at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station as a discrete artwork, humorously foreboding, and more comic than terrifying, presented like a credit from a B-list horror film. Yet it functions as the title for Boisjoly’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG). The simple sentence anticipates a future always approaching and acts as an entry point into the artist’s colourful text work in the CAG’s Window Spaces.
For this new artwork Boisjoly has quoted from three North American First Nations autobiographies: Black Elk Speaks, Yellow Wolf His Own Story, and During My Time by Florence Edenshaw Davidson, Boisjoly’s great grandmother. All of the stories tell of the legislation of indigenous rights amidst the coming of modernity, and each are conveyed in the first person as their own account, but are written by and equally credited to another author. Boisjoly uses these stories as emblematic of others by indigenous peoples to convey their layered authorship in an attempt to classify their value by defining them as a literary category.
Raymond Boisjoly is an artist of Haida and Québécois descent from Chilliwack, BC, currently based in Vancouver. Boisjoly has participated in numerous exhibitions including Beat Nation, Vancouver Art Gallery, (2012); Phantasmagoria, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2012); Tools for Conviviality, The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); Studies in Decay, OR Gallery, Vancouver (2011). Boisjoly received a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre in 2010 and is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
Presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC. This exhibition also marks a partnership with the City of Vancouver Fieldhouse Studio Residency Program and the Contemporary Art Gallery.
Contemporary Art Gallery, 555 Nelson Street, Vancouver BC V6B 6R5
