This photographic work continues the artist’s interest in technological mediation, what happens in the space between sender and receiver, and the provisional character of knowledge. The source material for (Shadows) & (Reflections) is the 1961 film The Exiles, which documents one night in the lives of young Aboriginal men and women living in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. By scanning the moving film, Boisjoly has created a distorted rainbow-hued still image that he has further complicated by an overlay of Xs – a reference to both a cartographic gesture (“here marks the spot”) and the problematic use of the X in place of a signature, which suggests an anonymous forfeiture of rights rather than a proof of identity. By disrupting and fragmenting the original signal, Boisjoly explores mediated representations of Aboriginality and questions the ways in which cultural and political intervals are captured and recorded as history.
