Joy Ray is an inter(anti)disciplinary artist engaged in speculative and spectral inquiries into mysteriousness and the unknown. She is interested in unreliable archives, language as an instrument of illumination and concealment, weaving as a gesture of rupture and attachment, quilting as a form of ambiguous embodiment, and (de)constructing found materials and texts. In her thesis exhibition, Conjuring the Ghost Kingdom, or The Insufficient Archive, Joy Ray investigates an uncanny collection of inherited artifacts, drawing upon poetic and theoretical discourses to (dis)entangle and invoke conceptual and revelatory potentialities.
Joy Ray lives and works in Hawai’i and Los Angeles, and exhibits internationally. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Quilts and Textiles in San Jose, California, the Hawai’i Museum of Contemporary Art in Hilo, Hawai’i, the Hawai’i State Art Museum in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. Ray’s work is held in the collection of the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California and in private collections. She has been featured in publications including the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artillery, Whitehot and Riot Material. Joy Ray is currently an MFA candidate in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Residency MFA program. Previously she received her Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.