Jess Dobkin


Jess Dobkin is a performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. She is best known for her 2006 work The Lactation Station.
She has a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Oberlin College, and an M.F.A. in Performance Art from Rutgers University. She is a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

Career

Dobkin first emerged as a performance artist in 2002. Her work draws on her experience as a lesbian and a mother. Her body often figures prominently in her performances. For example, Fee for Service, was a performance installation where audience members were invited to sharpen a pencil in Dobkin's vagina.
Dobkin is also known as a community organizer and often combines this with her creative work. In May 2015, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, she collaborated with many Toronto artists to create an alternative newsstand in a vacant kiosk at the Chester Subway Station in Toronto for one year. Meant as a "creative exchange" for commuters, the kiosk acted as a space for artists' exhibition and performance, while it still functioned as a newsstand selling newspapers, magazines, and snacks for a "monetary exchange."
Dobkin has collaborated with other performance artists, including Martha Wilson, founder of the Franklin Furnace Archive.

Major exhibitions

In 2006, Dobkin exhibited The Lactation Station in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art and Design's Professional Gallery, curated by Paul Couillard of FADO. In this exhibition, Dobkin invited audience members to sample human breast milk. The exhibition, which was partly funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, gained widespread attention and prompted Health Canada to issue a national warning against the online sale of human breast milk. It was remounted in 2012 as part of the OFFTA Festival in Montreal.
In 2015, Dobkin created How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb and performed it at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse in Toronto as part of Images Festival. The work is a response and ode to one of America’s foremost groundbreaking performance artists, Martha Wilson, and offers reflections and humorous observations on the way we see. It was inspired by Martha Wilson’s 2005 video titled A History of Performance Art According to Me. The work examined the history of performance art by defining its terms and conditions and acknowledging the history and inherent qualities of performance. It had multiple co-presenters, including the University of Toronto, York University, OCAD University, FADO Performance Art Centre, and the Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Works

Dobkin is a lesbian and mother of a daughter.