Jes [she/they] is an emerging interdisciplinary 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; the fuzzy space between subject/object, ornament/human, and body/image. 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].

Jes is currently wrapping up a project titled “Latent Shores” funded by the Canada Council of the Arts. The work fuses Cantonese Opera, rope, traditional Chinese knotting, pulse sensors, and dance. She is concurrently working as an intern architect on supportive housing projects at Human Studio. This work in architecture fuels her spatial and structural imaginings of a future beyond what we now know.

Currently reading: Foucault by Gilles Deleuze

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]