Jes [she/they] is an emerging multidisciplinary designer and performance artist trained in architecture. She works from the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, otherwise known as ‘Vancouver’. Using the body as a vessel and the face as a site, she is interested in exploring our collective posthuman and somatic futures [read: cyborg, multiple, & felt].  







                         



Specifically of mixed Czech-Cantonese-Vietnamese heritage and as a feminine East-Asian presenting womxn, the fields which influence her work encompass ornamentalism, somatics, critical studies, and speculative-fictions/futurities. She circles the idea of identity and embodiment via its racialized, gendered, and artifical edges. Jes’ artistic practice sifts through the fuzzy space between subject/object, ornament/person, and commodity/human. Her art has recently been exhibited at the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space [2022], Design at Riverside Gallery [2022], the Art Gallery of Mississauga [2022], Stackt Market [2021], and the Art Gallery of Peterborough [2020].  She is currently working as an intern architect on multifamily housing and cultural projects at Human Studio. This work in architecture fuels her spatial and structural imaginings of a future beyond what we now know.  

Currently reading: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Also referencing & orbiting: Ornamentalism [think: A. Cheng, T. Minh-ha, A. Suparak] | Posthumanism [think: R. Braidotti, L. Russell, A. Tsing, D. Haraway] | Somatic & Critical Studies [R. Menakem, P. Freire, G. Deleuze, J. Tronto, A. Lorde, J. Kristeva]