Jess Dobkin

Works and descriptions from Jess Dobkin’s website. For privacy reasons, images and videos cannot be embedded.

Affirmations for Artists, 2012. Reciting affirmations in the women’s bathroom at the Power Plant’s annual Power Ball event.

Mirror Ball, 2008-9. The Power Plant Power Ball, Toronto, Canada; The Performance Mix Festival, New York City; and other venues.The artist performs as a functional human mirror ball, exploring physical and psychological vulnerabilities, limitations and boundaries.

The Lactation Station, 2006. The Ontario College of Art & Design Professional Gallery, presented by Fado and co-presented by the Ontario College of Art & Design

The artist invites audiences to taste samples of pasteurized human breast milk donated by six lactating new mothers, inviting a dialogue about this challenging and most intimate of motherhood rites.

Bleeding at the Ball, 2011, The Power Plant.

Power Ball, 2010. Jess offers $100 “Power Ball” blow jobs in the bathroom of the public gallery for the Power Plant’s annual gala fundraiser.

Camille Turner

“Miss Canadiana is a persona created and performed by Camille Turner since 2002. She has made appearances across Canada and has represented Canada in the UK, Germany, Senegal, Australia, Cuba, Jamaica and Mexico. Documentation of the performances have been included in numerous exhibitions and festivals.”

Hometown Queen, pictured above is a series of staged photographs of Miss Canadiana returning to Hamilton, Ontario, Camille’s hometown.

“I created the Hometown Queen series to re-write my personal history and to pay homage to my complicated relationship with Hamilton, my hometown. The Hamilton I grew up in was a proud, hard-working steel town with a no-nonsense attitude. On the one hand I admire this city’s fierce resistance to the influence of nearby sprawling full-of-itself Toronto. On the other hand, growing up there I witnessed and experienced many incidents of blatant bigotry. I couldn’t wait to get away from Hamilton when I was young but now I realize that this complex city made me the person I am today—always looking beneath the surface and recognizing the irony in everything around me.”

Sherisse Mohammed’s 2005 video “Miss Canadiana”

“My image as Miss Canadiana points to the contradiction of the Canadian mythology. My body, as a representative of Canadian heritage, is surprising only because Blackness is perceived as foreign in Canada.”
Camille Turner

See Camille Turner’s site

Curling in the Squat Rack

Curling in the squat rack is strictly prohibited in the gym world; a big no-no. Since you are only able to squat in this area, people get very angry when they see someone using it for other purposes, especially when you can curl literally anywhere else in the gym. So I took that action that is shunned upon and entered that prohibited area.

Library of Babel Investigation

I was interested in investigating digital space and finding meaning in its seemingly random and volatile nature. The Library of Babel is a labyrinth of data using an algorithm to produce and locate any 3200 character combination of English letters, the coma, space, and period. I searched a few lines of text based upon a segment from David Benyon’s work Spaces of Interaction, Places for Experience on Digital space.

Discrete Intervention – Permitted Access by Andrea Aleman-Pastor

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For the Discrete Intervention assignment, I looked for places where I was allowed to go, but where I shouldn’t be. There is no sign or notice that informs the person not to enter, however, social expectations alone prohibit entering

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Andrea Aleman-Pastor

Intervening at McDonalds

My discreet intervention was that I bringing a McDonalds meal into the realm of fine dinning. People are not accustomed to seeing someone eat their chicken mcnuggets on a plate with proper silverware and fancy glasses.

109 Silvercreek Park – Grace Esford

Based on information collected through the public forum Reddit, the most dangerous address in Guelph, Ontario was located and became my destination. This image highlights a collection of data used to locate a place I should not be as well as images of the place and a receipt from a purchase while there.

A Discreet Intervention

I went into a building – namely the University of Guelph Science Complex- in which I wouldn’t normally enter, or have any business entering. In doing this I broke a personal idea that as an art student, I am not ‘allowed’ to be in a science building. I left behind a dime as a breadcrumb of me being there.

IMG_9757 from Alex Simons on Vimeo.

Walking where I’m not supposed to.

A Discreet Intervention – Katie Cheung

This totally functional cupboard is practical in the sense that it is very deep and it can store many things. With such a practical space I would believe that the opening of the cupboard is much bigger than the size of a human body so you can actually reach to the far back, unfortunately it is not. The opening is only big enough fit your shoulders through while giving you a claustrophobic feeling.

Cupboard 2