Fall Institute: Citing the World: Points of Interreference | Faculty: Raymond Boisjoly

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

• Philip K. Dick

The 2026 Fall Institute will concern the idea of interreference in considering art not as a practice of representation, but as a practice of citation.

To cite is to establish a relation between varied phenomena. Forms of knowledge do not emerge in isolation from one another. They develop through encounters with things which already exist. This program explores interreference by staging encounters between distinct bodies of knowledge that generate new forms of understanding. When a distinct practice frames an encounter with the material world, what is being cited is both the world itself and the work which provides access to it. Moving beyond questions of representation, it considers how art establishes correspondences between disparate histories, materials, concepts, disciplines, and traditions. Rather than asking what an artwork stands for, the program asks how it connects, translates, transforms, and reconfigures existing forms of knowledge.

Through research, discussion, experimentation, and sustained engagement with specialized fields of practice, participants will consider art as a method of citing the world. Particular attention will be given to the ways knowledge travels between contexts, how methods developed in one realm may be made useful in another, and how new conceptual possibilities emerge through unforeseen encounters. The program approaches the artwork not a representation of something beyond itself, but as a singular point through which diverse forms of knowledge converge and acquire new significance.

Rather than treating worlds as pre-existing objects awaiting depiction, the program approaches them as relational constructions assembled through acts of citation, collection, and invention.

Raymond Boisjoly is an artist and Haida citizen. His work is derived from his training in photography and engages diverse forms of production including writing and craft-based approaches. He uses various machines and equipment related to output and construction to capture technological processes interwoven with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins.

Boisjoly has been included in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2026, he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Boisjoly is an Associate Professor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. He is represented by Catriona Jeffries.