Art Metropole

#16090

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives

Price

$50.00

Date

2024

Publisher

AGYU

Format

Monographs

Genre

Performance Art

Description

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives celebrates the first-ever retrospective exhibition of performance art icon Jess Dobkin. This book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer, curator, and community activist and asks: How do archives perform? With a riot of full-colour photographs, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective provides unparalleled access to Dobkin’s artistic process and production from the last thirty years.

Laying out Dobkin’s archive for all gallery visitors to browse through, this maximal extravaganza first took over the AGYU in 2021 in an exhibition curated by Emelie Chhangur. Following in the footsteps of the exhibition, the Wetrospective book, edited by performance scholar and dramaturg Laura Levin, collects the threads of the show and presents Dobkin’s work as it should be: extravagantly, with a cast of theorists and critics including Ann Cvetkovich, Amy Fung, Jehan Roberson, and Roberta Mock. A gaggle of past performance artist collaborators make guest appearances, as well as copious photographs, chronologies, maps, and other archival documents.

This book not only documents the career of Dobkin to now, but it also documents how to document performance practice. With gusto. Designing such a thing could only be accomplished by someone intimately familiar with Dobkin’s practice, the inimitable Lisa Kiss. AGYU co-published this comprehensive catalogue with Intellect Books, UK, distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press.

Wetrospective book launch events will take the form of readings, artist’s talks, interviews, queer cabarets, and dance parties. Toronto book launch: November 9, 2024, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. New York book launch: December 9, 2024, at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU with the Franklin Furnace. Dates for Montreal, Vancouver, Chicago, and London to be announced soon.

Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, teacher, and mentor for more than 30 years. Her practice extends across theatres and galleries, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals and museums, universities and public archives. She has operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. Her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the ASTREA Foundation, The Theatre Centre, and other institutional and community partners. She has taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University and the University of Toronto and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She received a 2018–2019 Chalmers Arts Fellowship to support her research in international performance art archives and was Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at New York University. Recent projects include her artist commission For What It’s Worth for the Wellcome Collection, London, UK, and her solo exhibition Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) curated by Emelie Chhangur. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and traces of her performance work are held in performance art archives internationally.

Laura Levin is an associate professor of Theatre and Performance at York University, York Research Chair in Art, Technology, and Global Activism, and director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology. Levin is the author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In, winner of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Book Award. She is the former editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review; editor of numerous journal issues on performance practice and theory; and editor of three books: Theatre and Performance in Toronto; Conversations Across Borders; and Performance Studies in Canada (with Marlis Schweitzer). Laura has worked as a director, dramaturg, curator, and performer on several artistic research projects at the intersection of political performance, site-specificity, archives, and digital media. Laura is the director of the Hemispheric Encounters Network, a SSHRC Partnership Grant that brings together artists, activists, and scholars from across the Americas to study hemispheric performance as a research-creation methodology and tool for social change.

Emelie Chhangur is an influential voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada. An artist, writer, and curator for over two decades, she is celebrated for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice, the commissioning of complex works across all media, and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside gallery contexts. Chhangur is currently director/curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, where she fights for a community-engaged architectural design process to reimagine new museum architectures that ensure cultural spaces of Canada’s future no longer look like those of Canada’s colonial past.

Lisa Kiss opened her design studio after working at Eye Weekly for six years. During her tenure at the newspaper, she redesigned the logo and worked her way up through the production department to become art director. While at Eye, she ran a freelance business working with artists and cultural organizations. In 2000, she left to start Lisa Kiss Design. Today her work focuses on collaborating with artists, museums, and galleries and ranges from identity projects to book design to exhibition graphics.

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