jabs collabs

jabs, a collaborative duo comprised of Jasmine Gui and Abby Ho, is interested in explorative, experimental paper arts processes, considering creative exploration a central aspect to their art practice.

Their body of work includes writing and mark-making in the mediums of paper-making, book arts, mixed media collage, animation, and installation work  

Projects

2021

Referent 2, a jabs collab publication
Referent 2 is the second instalment of jabs' put-it-together-yourself card zine. Featuring 20 new images and 20 new poems, referent 2 takes up memory and childhood as its meditative topics to create new impressions in visual and textual form. Sized to match the first referent zine (currently out of print), no. 2 has been reoriented to a vertical accordion look, and also features handmade paper covers with typewritten font. This book is handmade in a limited edition of 30 copies.

2020

Transference, artist residency at Art Starts
Transference puts paper as a medium in conversation with other mediums such as clay, textiles and digital audio-visual projection, posing questions of markmaking processes as creative meditations on what it means to bear witness and testify to ever-evolving diasporic subjectivities, and how creative processes construct complex representations. Does the repetition of the subject ensure cohesion, or does a diverse labour process modify the subject in each application? We explore and manipulate these different mediums through different artistic processes, ranging from traditional Chinese baimiao drawing, paper cutting, and etching, to collage work and animation.

jabs’ summer papers, professional development at Paperhouse Studio
jabs’ summer papers was an intensive co-created with Paperhouse Studio that furthered our skills in paper arts through papermaking and bookbinding classes and designated studio time between June and September. This intensive was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.

2019

Twenty-Five, a solo exhibition at 187 Augusta
Twenty-Five is a process-based creative meditation on healing and labour featuring 25 hand-cut and watercolour prints on handmade paper, and an accompanying zine with vignette meditations, Twenty-Five is an interdisciplinary communal experience of love of self as an act of labour, and the process of labour as a path of healing. How do we come to know the lines and shapes of ourselves and what do we take with us as we journey?

2018

Sp l it (on-site papermaking), artist residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point
Sp l it is a papermaking residency, exploring the tensions between land and water histories in Tkaronto, particularly around the lakeshore and Menecing / Toronto Islands. Using the history of flooding on the islands (2017) being the most recent example), Tkaronto’s relationship with the lake as a trading port, the 1858 severing of the islands from the mainland, and the 2010 government of Canada’s land claim settlement with the Mississaugas as touchstones to consider land and water as archive and its absence, “Sp l it” is a site-specific papermaking process, using Lake Ontario water to pull sheets of paper, embedding history into the materiality of the paper object and the process of object creation.

2017

Referent, a jabs collab publication
Referent (zine) is hand-cut and hand-bound, put-it-together yourself zine. It features empty pages lined with photo corner tags and deck of 24 poems and 24 illustrations on 2.5″ square cards, packaged in tandem with the book. Individuals are invited to free associate the connections between these images and poems. In line with the spirit of the visual art piece, every “Referent” zine is different from the last, because of a different curating hand and eye.

Referent, exhibited as part of Evolution, Art Starts
“Referent”, is an illustration/poetry collage detailing landscapes and vignettes from the cities of Hong Kong and Toronto, places that Abby and Jasmine both have ties to. The web-inspired collage format gestures to the lack of a single point of origin, and the piece contemplates on the way the diasporic narrative is a construction of loose snapshots we construct our homes out of, as opposed to a fixed narrative pathway.