I am a video and performance artist. This website is designed to showcase my work and connect me with my audience.

News

Jesika at Images

---International Shorts Program 4:
The Light that Shines through the Fog of Desperation

Saturday April 7 @ 9:00 PM
Joseph Workman Theatre (1001 Queen Street West at Ossington)
Pay What You Can

Lives lived on camera. Elaborate performances, documents of the moment and the grey area between the two. The lens turned on the self, or focused close in on details that metaphorically illuminate our own loss, grief, and struggle in living.

---Talk to the Pie 2

Monday April 9 @ 3:00-5:00 PM
Gladstone Hotel Art Bar (1214 Queen Street West)

Jesika Joy, Dena DeCola & Karin E. Wandner, Emily vey Duke & Copper Battersby and Andrea Cooper, artists from the International Shorts Porgram The Light That Shines Through the Fog of Desperation, discuss capabilities of performance based work to express loss, grief and struggle via the lens of video. Moderated by Deirdre Logue.

Next Public Performance Piece - February 14 - Happy Valentines

Please email me if you want a private invitation to my next public performance piece.

Statement

"Nihilism is truth. We possess art lest we perish of the truth."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power)

I am a Toronto based artist and theorist. My work makes use of gesture and creative movement to produce what are often sexually explicit performances for the camera. I draw upon feminist performance art and body art as a means of complicating the phallic gaze to rearticulate gendered psychic and bodily experience. This project involves trying to adhere to certain culturally specific standards of 'realness' that produce the category of the 'desired female object.' In other words, I parody conventional imagery through using my own body as an important tool in the production of aesthetic representation. Although my aim is to seduce the viewer, by exploiting sites of cultural contention and incorporating abject imagery I also invoke viewer discomfort. This affective disjuncture contributes to a resignification of female sexuality while it avoids the production politically safe images. My process is based in an intuitive exploration of desire that strives to remain both emotionally honest and raw. As such, my ability to communicate 'intention' is a constant work in progress. When not making art I can be found working on my PhD in Social and Political Thought.

Blah, blah, blah. Art doesn't exist as art outside a discursive contextualization which both constitutes its existence as art along with its 'kind.' Quite frankly, I'm still working mine out. Dead animals are more important than feminism.

Reviews

Toronto Star - Jesika Joy's erotic gaze

Montreal Mirror - MUFF diving