Jesika Joy. Graphite Series (Faces #2), Oil, Graphite, and Charcoal on Panel, 16

Graphite Series

Jesika Joy

A Space Windows

January 24 – August 15, 2020

Opening January 24, 2020, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm


This series is about the mereologies of bodies and politics. Mereology is the study of the relation of parts to the whole. This project explores the question of what parts of the body belong to what politics and the different ways that politics are enacted through the body and its representations. Blood pours from these drawings, unifying the bodily order while the mirrored faces reveal a fractured subject. Hands grasp at a more rational mode of social organization but only find signs. Faces, hands, signs, and the anus in abstraction as a metaphorical equalizer exist as political symbols of the fraught body’s labor under the discipline of capital.

Biographies

Jesika Joy is a multimedia artist. Her video and performance art has been exhibited at festivals across Canada and internationally in Berlin, Atlanta, London, Boston, Paris, and New York. Joy holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University. Since having published her book Reconsidering Radical Feminism through UBC Press in 2018, she has been focused on drawing, oil painting and intaglio print-making. While Joy’s previous performance and video work was about gender and sexuality, she is working on several new series that explore questions of subjectivity and political justice.