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