Jess Dobkin

Last updated
Jess Dobkin
Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station promotional photo, 2006.jpeg
Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station promotional photo
Born1970
Alma mater Oberlin College, Rutgers University
Known for performance artist
Notable workLactation Station Breast Milk Bar (2006)
Movement Feminism, Queer, LGBTQ
Website jessdobkin.com

Jess Dobkin (born 1970) is a performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. [1] She is best known for her 2006 work The Lactation Station.

Contents

She has a Bachelor of Arts in women's studies from Oberlin College, and a Master of Fine Arts in performance art from Rutgers University. She is a fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

Career

Dobkin first emerged as a performance artist in 2002. [1] Her work draws on her experience as a lesbian and a mother. [2] Her body often figures prominently in her performances. For example, Fee for Service (2006), was a performance installation where audience members were invited to sharpen a pencil in Dobkin's vagina. [3] [4]

Dobkin is also known as a community organizer and often combines this with her creative work. In May 2015, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, she collaborated with many Toronto artists to create an alternative newsstand in a vacant kiosk at Chester station in Toronto for one year. Meant as a "creative exchange" for commuters, the kiosk acted as a space for artists' exhibitions and performances, while still functioning as a newsstand selling newspapers, magazines, and snacks for a "monetary exchange." [5]

Dobkin sometimes collaborates with other performance artists, including Martha Wilson, founder of the Franklin Furnace Archive. [6]

Dobkin was a frequent performer at Montreal's Edgy Women feminist performance festival between the years 2004 and 2010. [7]

Major exhibitions

In 2006, Dobkin exhibited The Lactation Station in Toronto at OCAD University's Professional Gallery, curated by Paul Couillard of FADO. [8] In this exhibition, Dobkin invited audience members to sample human breast milk. The exhibition, which was partly funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, gained widespread attention and prompted Health Canada to issue a national warning against the online sale of human breast milk. [5] [9] It was remounted in 2012 as part of Montreal's OFFTA Festival in co-presentation with Studio 303 at Usine C. [10] [11]

In 2009, Dobkin performed "Being Green," a video work in which she sings "Bein' Green" while dressed as Kermit the Frog and being fisted by another actor dressed as Jim Henson. [12]

In 2015, Dobkin created How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb (For Martha Wilson) and performed it at the Enoch Turner School in Toronto as part of the Images Festival. The work was an ode to one of America’s foremost performance artists, Martha Wilson. Dobkin's work was inspired by Martha Wilson’s 2005 video titled A History of Performance Art According to Me, which examined the history of performance art. It had multiple co-presenters, including the University of Toronto, York University, OCAD University, FADO Performance Art Centre, and the Toronto-Dominion Bank. [13]

In 2021, the Art Gallery of York University presented Dobkin's first solo retrospective exhibition, Wetrospective, curated by Emelie Chhangur. [14] [15] A book retrospective on Dobkin's work edited by Laura Levin, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives, was published in 2024. [16]

Works

Personal life

Dobkin is Jewish, a lesbian, and a mother. [17] [18]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chester station (Toronto)</span> Toronto subway station

Chester is a subway station on Line 2 Bloor–Danforth in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The station is located on Chester Avenue just north of Danforth Avenue. Wi-Fi service is available at this station. It opened in 1966 as one of the original stations of this subway line.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Belmore</span> Canadian Anishinaabekwe artist (born 1960)

Rebecca Belmore is a Canadian interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist who is notable for politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She is Ojibwe and a member of Obishikokaang. Belmore currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Astman</span> Canadian artist (born 1950)

Barbara Anne Astman is a Canadian artist who has recruited instant camera technology, colour xerography, and digital scanners to explore her inner thoughts.

Martha Wilson is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sara Diamond (academic administrator)</span> Canadian artist and former university president

Sara Louise Diamond, is a Canadian artist and was the president of OCAD University, Canada.

William Grant Munro was a Toronto artist, club promoter, and restaurateur known for his work as a community builder among disparate Toronto groups. As a visual artist, he was known for fashioning artistic works out of underwear; as a club promoter, he was best known for his long-running Toronto queer club night, Vazaleen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith Cole (performance artist)</span> Canadian artist

Keith Cole is a queer Canadian performance artist and political activist. Originally from Thunder Bay, Ontario, he is currently based in Toronto, Ontario. An alumnus of York University's Fine Arts program, Cole has worked in film and video, dance and theatre performance, both as himself and in character as drag queen Pepper Highway.

Bonnie Devine is a Serpent River Ojibwa installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, curator, and writer from Serpent River First Nation, who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an associate professor at OCAD University and the founding chair of its Indigenous Visual Cultural Program.

Shary Boyle is a contemporary Canadian visual artist working in the mediums of sculpture, drawing, painting and performance art. She lives and works in Toronto.

Tanya Mars is a performance and video artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Wendy Coburn (1963–2015) was a Canadian artist and professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is known for her sculptures and for her video-based show "Anatomy of a Protest" (2014).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl L'Hirondelle</span> Canadian artist

Cheryl L'Hirondelle is a Canadian multidisciplinary media artist, performer, and award-winning musician. She is of Métis/Cree (non-status/treaty), French, German, and Polish descent. Her work is tied to her cultural heritage. She explores a Cree worldview or nêhiyawin through body, mind, emotions, and spirit; examining what it means to live in contemporary space and time.

Simone Jones is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist known for her kinetic artworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kay Turner</span>

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures. She co-founded “Girls in the Nose,” a lesbian feminist rock punk band that anticipated riot grrl.

Tsēma Igharas, formerly known as Tamara Skubovius, is an interdisciplinary artist and member of the Tāłtān First Nation based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Igharas uses Potlatch methodology in making art, to assert the relationships between bodies and the world, and to challenge colonial systems of value and measurement of land and resources.

Andrea Fatona is a Canadian independent curator and scholar. She is an associate professor at OCAD University, where her areas of expertise includes black, contemporary art and curatorial studies.

Daniel Solomon is an abstract painter who uses intense, vibrant colour in his work, combined with complex, pictorial space, inspired by artists such as Jack Bush and is a painter and professor in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University.

Winsom is a Canadian-Jamaican Maroon multi-media artist working in textiles, painting, video, installations, and puppetry. Her work explores human spirituality.

Julie Voyce is a Canadian multimedia artist, known for her imaginative imagery, and for printmaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Liliefeldt</span> South African-Canadian artist

Louise Liliefeldt is a Canadian artist primarily working in performance and painting. She was born in South Africa and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Liliefeldt’s artistic practice draws directly from her lived experience and is apparent in the use of symbol, colour and material in her work. Other influences include Italian, Latin and Eastern European horror films, surrealism and African cinema. Taken as a whole, Liliefeldt’s work is an embodied investigation of the culture and politics of identity, as influenced by collective issues such as gender, race and class. Her performance work has developed through many prolific and specific periods.

References

  1. 1 2 Gillespie, Benjamin (1 January 2012). "Giving us "Everything She's Got": Processing the Script-as-Archive in Jess Dobkin's Queer Performance Art". Canadian Theatre Review. 149: 52–63. doi:10.3138/ctr.149.52. ISSN   0315-0836.
  2. Reeve, Charles (2012). Buller, Rachel Epp (ed.). Reconciling Art and Mothering. Farnham: Ashgate. pp. 125–136. ISBN   978-1-4094-2613-4.
  3. Krpan, Pike (2009). "Body of Work". Shameless : 30.
  4. Zerihan, Rachel (25 September 2022). "Intercourse Discourse in One-to-One Performance: Explicit Approaches to Interaction". The Cultural Politics of One-to-One Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 131–151. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-47755-2_5. ISBN   978-1-137-47755-2.
  5. 1 2 Clarke, Katrina (20 May 2015). "Artists take over Chester subway station newsstand for one year". The Star. Toronto Star. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
  6. "How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb For Martha Wilson". blogTO. Retrieved 29 November 2024.
  7. "Archives / Edgy Women". Studio 303. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  8. "Sense and sensibilities". NOW Toronto. 20 July 2006.
  9. Weeks, Carly (13 July 2006). "Human milk sold online carries HIV risk: Warning". The Ottawa Citizen.
  10. Loveless, Natalie (2 July 2019), Robinson, Hilary; Buszek, Maria Elena (eds.), "Maternal Mattering: The Performance and Politics of the Maternal in Contemporary Art" , A Companion to Feminist Art (1st ed.), Wiley, pp. 475–491, doi:10.1002/9781118929179.ch27, ISBN   978-1-118-92915-5, S2CID   203048662
  11. Chan, Crystal (23 May 2012). "Breast milk's on tap at the OFFTA with Jess Dobkin's Lactation Station". Nightlife. Retrieved 13 May 2015.
  12. "Jess Dobkin, a Performance Artist With a Unique Sense of Humor". Artmerit. Retrieved 29 November 2024.
  13. "How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb (For Martha Wilson)". IMAGES FESTIVAL. Archived from the original on 5 March 2017.
  14. "Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective". The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery. 2 September 2021.
  15. "Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective". Feminine Moments. 27 August 2021.
  16. "Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives". The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery. 16 October 2024.
  17. Alland, Sandra (5 July 2006). "Performance art: The Lactation Station". Xtra Magazine.
  18. Fuhrmann, Mike (15 June 2006). "Performance artist offers breast milk tastings". Toronto Star .