Guest Curator arts assembly select
artists jes sachse and sarah wong
[Image Description: Arts Assembly logo consisting of black text in capital letters that says ARTS ASSEMBLY]
Guest Curator Arts Assembly have selected artists jes sachse and Sarah Wong to further develop and publically present Wheezy Breezy in Toronto in the summer of 2024. Additionally, Whitney and Meichen are intending to explore ways to present Wheezy Breezy in a way that is accessible, relevant, and appropriate to blind and low vision communities, as an organization led by sighted individuals. Arts Assembly is hoping to deepen their connection with local, artistically engaged blind and low vision communities, and hope that their research and consultations around improving visual accessibility at an organizational level will support their connecting with other partners interested in this work.
jes sachse and sarah wong’s wheezy breezy
images: starship troopers, the sleepover, tetris bouquet, courtesy of artist jes sachse
[ID: displayed across the screen in a horizontal triptych are three artistic images by artist jes sachse of this collaboration, from 2022. The dimensions of each image are a square shape placed evenly alongside each other. On a 1970s hue orange lacquer table in each image are three different inhalers to treat bronchitis. The inhalers much like the table are orange, muted indigo and navy, and and beige and forest green.
The first image, entitled “starship troopers”, has each of the three inhalers pointing canister to the right staggered diagonally across the table with a light source casting a metallic flair from the end of the canisters, all pointing in a row like guns.
The second image, entitled “the sleepover”, has the three inhalers positioned with their canisters upright in the L shape with the inhalers closely together as though spooning and sleeping.
The final image, entitled “tetris bouquet”, has the three inhalers curled around each other forming a pinwheel like shape referencing the L shaped piece in the video game Tetris.]
Wheezy Breezy is a self-directed residency by dancers jes sachse & Sarah Wong welcomed by personal invitation through support in access & incubation during the 2023-2024 season by Arts Assembly. Arts Assembly was chosen as one of the Guest Curators for Dancemakers Centre for Creation 2023-2024 season, and Dancemakers is excited to support Wheezy Breezy's further development and public presentation in the summer of 2024 in Toronto.
From jes and Sarah:
“Our collaborative research sits in the complexities of navigating our dance practices as disabled artists breathing through the ongoing pandemic. Focusing on the necessary act of breath that bodies unconsciously choreograph is a way to reveal how bodies have been interrupted by eugenics insistence to “return to normal”. Leaning into accessibility interrupts capital procedure by nurturing creative adaptation of one moment to the next. We are experimenting with dancing in relationship with the medical, with aesthetic, with public space, and with the improvisations of sonic accompaniment, looking to traditions of busking and jazz music.
As we move in step with grief, we make space for candid conversations of coexisting with ghosts, aesthetics of ease vs. effort, community and site-specificity, the found & the fallow. We find deep joy in the solidarity we have found in each other knowing in our creature-bodies that breathing is the circadian recalibration of the collective.”
[Image description: jes is a wee white queer and trans person with a double helix spine holding their phone camera down from an angle above them on street under conconstruction with orange and black cones in the background, in the Junction neighbourhood of Tkaronto and the stolen lands of Treaty 13 of the “Toronto Purchase”. They are a they/them wearing their long blonde ish hair in braids under a backwards black ball cap in the summer, with a multi-striped tank top and white jeans like a young gay in summer. They are wearing clear plastic red lip-shaped sunglasses and a yellow cotton face mask cuz this selfie was taken in 2020 and we didn’t all have access to N95s and higher tech gear yet. They have matching neon yellow accessories - two large acrylic earrings in the stencil shape of the trans & disability symbol by Sky CubaCub of Rebirth Garments, and a plastic tote on a metal chain by Nikki Lam.]
[ID:A selfie taken by Sarah, a Chinese person in her twenties with lightly tanned skin and black hair with neon green highlights, cut into a mullet. She wears a dark green tank top to match her highlights, dangly rock earrings, a necklace with a rock (she really likes rocks), and a black KN95 cone-shaped mask to protect her from breathing in scary viruses and wildfire smoke. She looks straight into the camera, her face aglow with summer sweat.]
Presently living in Tkaronto, jes sachse is an artist, writer and dancer who addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care. Often found marrying poetry with large scale sculptural forms, their work has been presented and supported by Dancemakers, the Centre de Création et Recherche O Vertigo (Montréal), Harbourfront Centre, among other centres. Their work has appeared in and been profiled by NOW Magazine, The Peak, Canadian Art, C Magazine, CV2 -The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada, and the 40th Anniversary Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. @squirrelofmystery
Sarah Wong is an emerging writer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work emerges from her lived experiences as a queer and disabled 2nd generation Chinese-“Canadian,” focusing on archival processes and accessing embodied intergenerational knowledge to trace relationships between identity and lineage. Her practice makes space for the multiple, creating work that spans score-based improvisational performances, ritual-based research, site-specific installation, textiles, poetry, film, and zines. She is devoted to cultivating practices of care, creating and facilitating spaces for bodies to rest. Sarah’s work has been presented in Vancouver by Arts Assembly, UNIT/PITT, Vines Art Festival, New Works, Number 3 Gallery, Hatch Art Gallery, The Dance Centre, dumb Instrument Dance, IGNITE! Youth Arts Festival, and Boombox, and internationally by Mosaico Danza Interplay Festival (Italy) and Sàn Art (Vietnam). sarahwong.ca | @swongski
arts assembly curatorial project
Arts Assembly’s programming in recent years has had a strong emphasis on movement, relationships, and access. With this in mind, Co-Directors & Co-Curators Meichen Waxer and Whitney Brennan invited two artists they've had the pleasure of working with – jes sachse and Sarah Wong – to come together in 2023 (between Toronto and Vancouver) to think, breathe and feel together in developing future work. Arts Assembly dedicated time and resources to Sarah and jes, providing fees for consultation, materials, and learning surrounding practices rooted in access and care. jes and Sarah were artists in Arts Assembly’s dual city program of The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home, and were panelists for the community sharing of the blind and low vision accessible recordings of the series with VocalEye – Descriptive Arts Society.
As guest curators for Dancemakers, Arts Assembly has invited Sarah and jes to further develop and publically present “Wheezy Breezy” in Toronto in the summer of 2024. Additionally, Whitney and Meichen are intending to explore ways to present “Wheezy Breezy” in a way that is accessible, relevant, and appropriate to blind and low vision communities, as an organization led by sighted individuals. Arts Assembly is hoping to deepen their connection with local, artistically engaged blind and low vision communities, and hope that their research and consultations around improving visual accessibility at an organizational level will support their connecting with other partners interested in this work.
As Arts Assembly is a community-focused arts organization that emphasizes artistic collaboration, discursive research, and reciprocal exchange, Meichen (Toronto) and Whitney (Vancouver) are curious how to continue to engage curatorially with each other across time, space, and their disparate cities, thinking about how this feeds into their intentional practices of slowness and support. Arts Assembly hopes for the research and development around visual accessibility for “Wheezy Breezy” to inform their future projects, their practices, and their presence in the arts world.
Banner photo: Arts Assembly’s The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home, 2021 / Photo by Yuula Benivolski