A tour of the exhibition, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, with curator of the exhibition, Emelie Chhangur, and the artist, Jess Dobkin.

Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, mentor, and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. Her practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals and single bathroom stalls. She operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk (The Artist-Run Newsstand), a soup kitchen for artists (The Artists’ Soup Kitchen), a breast milk tasting bar (The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar), and a performance festival hub for kids (Free Childcare Provided). Her 2017 performance, The Magic Hour, was developed and produced in a multi-year residency at The Theatre Centre with support of the Canada Council. She received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship to fund her international archival research in 2018–19. She’s 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. Jess is currently Curator of the Performing Archives stream of a multi-year “Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices” SSHRC Partnership Grant. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and her performance work is held in performance art archives internationally.

Curator, writer, and artist, Emelie Chhangur, is the Director and Curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This appointment follows a significant curatorial career at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). At AGYU, she led the reorientation of the gallery to become a civic, community-facing, ethical space driven by social process and intersectional collaboration; she founded the gallery’s residency program and received 25 OAAG awards for her contributions in writing, publishing, exhibition-making, and public and education programming. Over the past 20 years, Chhangur has emerged as a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada and is celebrated nationally and internationally 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 the gallery context. Distinguishing herself as a cultural worker dedicated to questioning the social and civic role of the public institutions of art, Emelie Chhangur has developed a curatorially-engaged approach to working across cultural, aesthetic, and social differences through a practice she calls “in-reach” — a concept that has since transformed engaged institutional practice in the arts across Canada. In 2019, she won the Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ inaugural BIPOC Changemaker Award and in 2020, the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence.