Studies in Decay is a new group exhibit at the Or Gallery curated by UBC Critical and Curatorial Studies’ candidate Jonah Gray. Dark and intense, the images propose to examine realities of contemporary experience in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s theorem that the world continuously moves towards decay.

Raymond Boisjoly is an Aboriginal artist living and working in Vancouver. His most recent series of images, The Writing Lesson, uses visual conventions associated with black metal music to create logos for indigenous place names like Chilliwack, Massett, Skidegate and Nanaimo. Scolling and thorny, the Nordic-inspired logos represent a vernacular mode of indigenous word markings, while stressing text and writing as political tools. Boisjoly earned his MFA at UBC in 2008 and has since exhibited in Ottawa, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chongqing, China.

Jordy Hamilton (UBC, MFA 2010) is an Ontario-born Vancouver-based artist known for conceptual installations as well as for paintings copied from images in National Geographic. His contribution to Studies in Decay consists of a series of 4 x 6 inch prints and two videos documenting an annual barbeque and trap-shooting event at the artist’s family home, which culminates in a shoot-up of a motorcycle.

Laura Piasta, a Vancouver artist currently living in Sweden and Berlin, presents Crystallized Jean Jacket, a denim jacket hardened from saltwater soaking . Pinned to the wall, the jacket evokes an absent body. Piasta is currently working towards her Master’s of Fine Arts at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden. She has shown in Berlin and Vancouver, and in 2007 received a VADA award.

www.orgallery.org

Mia Johnson