Artist

Jesika Joy

Jesika Joy is a Toronto based artist working in video and performance. Through exaggerating normalized social practice and incorporating abject imagery, she creates radical feminist interventions cloaked in a postmodern aesthetic.

“Nihilism counts as ‘truth.’ …We possess art lest we perish of the truth” (Nietzsche).
Jesika Joy is a Toronto based artist and theorist for whom art-making is an act of faith. She uses gesture and creative movement to create abrasive imagery for live audiences and the camera. Through exaggerating normalized social practice and incorporating abject imagery, she creates work that speaks to radical feminist political concerns through the use of poststructuralist tools. She strives towards honesty in rearticulating gendered psychic experience while hoping her work speaks to larger existential concerns that span the specificities of embodiment.

Joy has exhibited at numerous venues including Images, Nuit Blanche, Inside Out, the Paris Lesbian and Feminist Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, Sixty Second Film and Video Festival, herland, Queer City Cinema, International ArtExpo, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Massive Party and as part of the Art Gallery of York University’s “Hot… New… Video… Art…” She has also screened and performed at numerous academic conferences and forums across Canada and the United States and has had her work published or reviewed in The Toronto Star, Capital Magazine, Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, FWord Nouveau Magazine, The Canadian National Newspaper, Taro Magazine, and the Montreal Mirror.

Artist Code: 930

Videography

Public Ritual #4

2006, 04:00 minutes

Public Ritual #3

2006, 06:30 minutes

Public Ritual #2

2006, 03:00 minutes

I Don’t Even Fucking Love You

2006, 01:34 minutes

Subject to Subject

2006, 04:24 minutes

Untitled (Camera Blow)

2006, 03:00 minutes

The Kiss

2006, 01:15 minutes

Sometimes…

2006, 00:36 minutes

(Water)

2006, 01:42 minutes

Dear God

2006, 00:52 minutes

Strip Show

2005, 03:11 minutes

Pig Heart

2005, 02:04 minutes

Critical Writing

The Bloody Matriarch: Interview with Jesika Joy
by John Paul Gilson. Broken Pencil, Summer 2008, no. 39.
The Paper Bag Princess: A Interview with Jesika Joy
by Denisa Mertiri. the f word nouveau, Oct. Fall 2007.
MUFF diving: Shaved Barbies, condoms, chickens and more at the...
by Matthew Hays. Montreal Mirror, May 2007, v. 22, no. 47.
Jesika Joy's erotic gaze: Show offers sex along with...
by Peter Godard. The Toronto Star, Aug. 24, 2006.