\nFurthermore, disability aesthetics as agitprop essentially unveils our biases associated with productivity, challenging the relationship between art and an institution that favours artists who are capable of bearing up to the physical and monetary demands of the art world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n
Toronto-based performance artist, disability activist, and dear friend to many jes sachse embodied this rhetoric by refusing to ask for permission to broadcast the complexities of their material circumstances, motivating others to be vocal about injustices that persist in the arts. jes\u2019s militant crip aesthetic valued a process of critiquing the inequities attached to living and working within the imperial core1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - I use the term imperial core to make a distinction of countries and nations such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and Australia, who have benefited from widespread imperialism that exploits poorer, resource-rich nations via economic, military, cultural, and political dominance.<\/span> as an artist while disabled. On May 10, 2025, sadly, we lost our beloved agitator-propagandist to an unexpected death, leaving me and many others with the complicated task of appropriately celebrating their short yet storied life and art practice. jes forged conversations surrounding the politics of disability that are deeply attached to representation, labour rights, and physical accessibility, but did so in an oftentimes absurdly tongue-and-cheek manner. Their practice urged the dissolution of the private versus public, an essential characteristic of disability aesthetics, placing the personal within the political as a means of reclaiming space and highlighting the shortcomings of the capitalist system. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\njes sachse<\/strong>
To Be Frank,<\/em> promotional photography, 2017.
Photo: Yuula Benivolski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThis is clear in their i need a minute<\/em> (2021) gold plaques that were meant to replicate the donor plaques we are accustomed to seeing on the walls of art institutions. The i need a minute<\/em> plaques were included in several exhibitions, most notably Undeliverable <\/em>(2021\u201322), curated by Carmen Papalia at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, but more importantly they were handed out to friends, colleagues, and community members to signify an (un)spoken understanding of the necessity of slowness within the art landscape. Whether it was jes\u2019s intention or not, I interpret this work as a disruptive appraisal of who is at liberty to receive project funding and who has not been chosen by the establishment; an inherently crip acknowledgment of labour that is not considered by the wider art world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2017, jes began their unauthorized performance To Be Frank<\/em>, in which they pushed a wheelchair around the atrium of the Walker Court at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), home to the museum\u2019s famous spiral staircase designed by the celebrated architect Frank Gehry. The purpose of this defiant act was to comment on the lack of straightforward access to the galleries for those using mobility devices. jes performed this monotonous ritual in eight separate hour-long performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\njes sachse<\/strong>
To Be Frank,<\/em> 2017-2024, performance view, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2017.
Photo: Yuula Benivolski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\njes would reprise the work in 2023 in the aftermath of Wanda Nanibush\u2019s departure as the AGO\u2019s curator of Indigenous Art, following her support of Palestinian statehood.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - The AGO has not formally acknowledged Nanibush\u2019s dismissal. See Jason McBride, \u201cWhy Did Canada\u2019s Top Art Gallery Push Out a Visionary Curator?,\u201d The Walrus<\/em> (website), February 26, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> In response, jes militantly adorned signs that read \u201cGaza Will Be Free\u201d and unfurled a banner that read: \u201cDear AGO, When shall we schedule this conversation about genocide?\u201d They occupied Walker Court every Free Wednesday Night from 2023 to spring 2024, to protest the museum\u2019s silence on Nanibush\u2019s firing and its lack of acknowledgment of the ongoing human rights injustices in Palestine. In this performative and communal gesture of care, jes asked other artists, many also disabled, to join their act of defiance of the institution\u2019s complacency, power, and silencing. Week after week, they risked harassment from AGO security and staff to disrupt the appearance of decorum. It is important to note that many of jes\u2019s most thought-provoking works existed outside of the formal gallery setting and were unpaid: they were inherently political agitations. The disability arts scholar Eliza Chandler argues that disability aesthetics mobilizes \u201ca disruptive politic.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Eliza Chandler, \u201cIntroduction: Cripping the Arts in Canada,\u201d Canadian Journal of Disability Studies<\/em> 8, no. 1 (February 2019): 1\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200a14, February 26, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> In turn, disability aesthetics functions as agitprop and forces the public, participants, and audiences to re-evaluate the institutions we are meant to uphold, a point exemplified in jes\u2019s work at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Up until their passing, jes was in a tumultuous legal battle to ensure they would not be evicted from the accessible home that they had rented for years in Toronto\u2019s Parkdale area. Ultimately, they won this battle, unfortunately just a few weeks shy of their death. jes\u2019s inability to access adequate living conditions makes clear that the individuals who feel most drawn to broadcast the injustices within the neoliberal institutional framework are often those who are failed by it in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\nTime and access are largely not afforded to the working class, able-bodied or otherwise, but the experiences and militancy of disability aesthetics is the disproportionate voice for the experiences of the many.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThis speaks to the broader institutional logic that treats the extraction of disabled stories as evidence of progress, even as disabled artists continue to shoulder the material and emotional costs of maintaining an art practice. For example, artists in Ontario receiving subsidies from the Ontario Disability Support Program risk losing their monthly benefits if they apply for arts funding. jes routinely grappled with this, writing, \u201crepresentation of my image kept being demanded of me, with little to no remuneration, a long standard practice of treatment for people with disabilities under capitalism.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - jes sachse, \u201cStatement,\u201d Wynn Newhouse Awards (website), February 26, 2026, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\njes sachse<\/strong>
To Be Frank<\/em>, 2017-2024, performance view, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Gabrielle Moser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe question thus arises of whether a more radical unauthorized and unrelenting approach to creation is the only way for disabled artists to have agency over their narratives. When our survival as artists is dependent on maintaining decorum within art institutions, we allow inaccessible labour conditions to continue and to proliferate. jes maintained a politic that rejected the spectacle of the disabled body, even as they manufactured spectacle in performance to showcase the absurdities of the system. Their work demands that we hold on to an ethic of community, moving at a slower pace, and making space for institutional reflection and accountability. The radicality of crip aesthetics is crucial in a society that continually attempts to quiet disabled convictions in order to accommodate those deemed less \u201cdifficult.\u201d jes, who was often mischaracterized as \u201cdifficult to work with,\u201d urged us to recognize that disability aesthetics as agitprop and the willingness of disabled artists to risk their bodies and livelihoods emerge in response to the very system that repeatedly fails them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a disabled artist, I have always been pressured to accept as many projects as possible in order to maintain relevance in the Canadian arts community. Attempting to keep up with my over-represented able-bodied peers in an extractive environment requires more than anyone should have to participate in. Like jes, I was marked with a \u201cdisordered\u201d body at birth, told that living in a body that betrays is a tragedy that requires fixing. Though the ways in which my disabled body presents itself are chronic, slow, and Mad, I passed as able-bodied for much of my life until I could no longer ignore my fate. Even as my body took more than two decades to catch up to my rapid pace, it was not until I was introduced to jes\u2019s work in Chandler\u2019s Disability Arts course at Toronto Metropolitan University that I understood the phenomenological importance of a body characterized as \u201cbroken.\u201d Learning about disability aesthetics taught me that \u201cbroken bodies\u201d transcend space and time by critiquing the status quo and what we have perceived to be true on individual and societal scales. More specifically, the imperial core\u2019s relationship to labour and productivity, the ableist preoccupation with maximizing one\u2019s time, is an effect of capital that seeps into our institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Disability aesthetics complicates entrenched notions of \u201cnormalcy.\u201d It exposes the fallacy of productivity, revealing how capitalist definitions of value are disrupted by bodies that do not\u200a\u2014\u200aor cannot\u200a\u2014\u200aconform to its demands. To identify as a disabled artist in the current cultural apparatus is to grapple with having to choose between speaking authentically to the realities of the current world or reducing our experiences to those necessary for survival. In the case of jes and their practice, they made clear that the conditions we work under as artists are unsustainable; maintaining neutrality and exploiting one\u2019s identity for creative or financial fulfilment is a laborious task that does not benefit the collectivity. In reflecting on their legacy, we must acknowledge that disability art is more than a mere disabled body exposing the inaccessibility and institutional complacency of the art world. It is, in fact, making glaringly clear the connections between disabled lived experiences and the marginalization of economically disenfranchised and racialized groups all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\njes sachse<\/strong>
To Be Frank<\/em>, 2017-2024, performance view, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Gabrielle Moser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nRecently, I wondered whether jes would have remounted To Be Frank<\/em> for a third time if they were still alive\u200a\u2014\u200athis time in response to the AGO acquisition committee\u2019s recent decision not to acquire Stendhal Syndrome <\/em>(2024) by the Jewish American photographer Nan Goldin, citing Goldin\u2019s solidarity with Palestine as \u201cantisemitic\u201d and \u201coffensive.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Josh O\u2019Kane, \u201cAGO Rocked by Resignations After Failed Nan Goldin Acquisition,\u201d The Globe and Mail<\/em> (January 21, 2026), February 26, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> I can ponder whether jes would have been back in the gallery atrium protesting censorship, but I understand that through their subversive agitations, they provided a way forward for more artists to feel agency in speaking out against structural policies and conditions such as this that go unchecked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As most disabilities are progressive and capitalism requires immortality\u200a\u2014\u200aspecifically, in the form of the immortal servant, the perfectly bodied individual\u200a\u2014\u200awe can begin to acknowledge that the existence of disabled people is a direct threat to extractive labour. Our bodies and stories are a persistent reminder that there are no such things as art emergencies, and the false urgency imposed on all of us to work until we die is entirely manufactured. Disability aesthetics, and in turn, jes\u2019s agitprop performances, can thus act as a catalyst for us all to better understand our relationship with work and art, and as the humanities scholar Anna Gibbs explains, can allow us to \u201ccatch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear\u2026 [inflaming] nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Anna Gibbs, \u201cContagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,\u201d Australian Humanities Review<\/em> 24 (December 2001), February 26, 2026, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I look at jes\u2019s life and practice as evidence of the contagion of disability aesthetics and a seed that can be spread and planted so that we can collectively comprehend the systemic issues that plague the arts and recognize that we are intrinsically connected in our struggles. As artists, we must acknowledge the work to be done when it comes to deciding whether to be politically engaged in institutional critique or to continue as if nothing is happening outside the walls of the white cube.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The existence of the disabled individual has historically carried a corporality inextricably tied to centuries of subjection. Notably, this cumbersome past is defined by institutionalization, medicalization, and eugenics from the 1800s into the mid-twentieth century in North America. As I write this, disabled people continue to face systemic marginalization that proliferates in a casually violent manner, thanks to the social and economic effects of neoliberal capitalism\u200a\u2014\u200aspecifically, austerity measures and the privatization of care.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":275449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"numeros":[8013],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[8027],"artistes":[2617],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-275484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-117-handi","auteurs-christina-oyawale","artistes-jes-sachse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275484"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275490,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275484\/revisions\/275490"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275484"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=275484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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