Been Here So Long

jes sachse and Fallon Simard

Resistance is always in conversation with care.

Been Here So Long is the first material collaboration between jes sachse and Fallon Simard. Separately, and here together, their work explores strategies for PTSD and continuance in the struggle of survival.

Taking up the aesthetics and materiality of industrial signage, the collaboration produced three works that refuse the assumed neutrality of legibility and universal language. Invoking large scale meme-poems in call and answer fashion, a friendship plays in the cadence of this wayfinding gesture.

Fallon Simard is an Anishinaabe artist and filmmaker from Couchiching First Nation, in Treaty #3 Territory. Their work examines state violence perpetrated on to Indigenous bodies within a context of colonialism. Their work looks at intersections of land, extraction, mental health, and violence.

jes sachse is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and curator. Often found marrying poetry with large-scale sculptural forms, their work addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care.

Their website:

http://reterritorialization.wixsite.com/simardproductions