Gradex banner
Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Meet the Artist

Jes

Bonnie

Sculpture

“My thesis work "Tender Fragments" is a series of three large scale sculptures that venture into the ephemerality of memory and intimacy utilizing the distortion of images printed on fleece blankets as the primary material. The three imposing pieces bearing five unique images loiter within the space, each distinctly embodying the printed textile's image. Iterative photographs transform into restrained, contorted, and bulging vessels; pushing their visual textures into a realm of decadent surrealism. The selected images include an internal surgical view of the artist's uterus, a crushed insect, and a concrete body cast of a lover's collarbone. A painterly moment of sapphic embrace collides with a raw, glistening cross-section of sliced fish at a local market. Each image echoes the same language of an aching and intimate aesthetic. Memory woven into sculptural image, pixels crunching and warping at their dramatically reborn scale, feebly recalling their original forms. Existing at the intersection of aesthetic beauty and revulsion, the artworks remind us of moments once lived, and the hurt that is inherent within the shifting temporality of remembering. ”

Follow me

Share with someone

JesBonnie
Profile Picture
divider
Jes Bonnie (she/they/he) is a Toronto based artist who has recently completed the Sculpture and Installation program at OCAD University. Jes explores themes surrounding memory embodied, sapphic intimacy, and the intersecting aesthetic and grotesque. Working as an interdisciplinary artist with a primary focus on sculpture, she reimagines the boundaries of familiar materials and their associated emotional resonances; bringing to life a uniquely unsettling visual decadence in a wide array of mediums.
OCAD University
Sculpture and Installation
Major In progress, 2026
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Sculpture/Installation
Major Completed, 2026

Sculpture

2026, "The Sex Show"
Gallery 1313, Toronto ON
2024, "A PLANT'S OEUVRE"
JACOBTOLEDO Gallery, Mexico City
2024, "a blissful scabbing"
Remote Gallery, Toronto ON
2024, Queeratorial Artist Residency, Mexico City
OCADU International
divider