Jes [she/they] is an emerging multidisciplinary designer and performance artist trained in architecture. 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]. She works from the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, otherwise known as ‘Vancouver’.

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: Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus?, Ed. Kim Ngyuen & Jeanne Gerrity

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]