Remembering jes sachse: disability activist, artist and maker of good trouble

"We need more poetry." These are the first words I can remember jes sachse, the Toronto-based performance artist, disability activist and trans charmer, saying to me. It was late at night, in the fall of 2019, and we were seated next to one another at the now-closed queer landmark, The Beaver, on Queen Street West. Following a public talk by poet Jackie Wang I'd helped organize at the Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre across the street, sachse had settled into a corner booth along with the rest of the event organizers. There, they were rapidly assembling drinking straws into long sticks, laid out on the table like stalks of bamboo. 

The straws were destined for Freedom Tube (2013), an ongoing series of sculptures made by inserting bendy plastic straws into one another to make long lengths that hang from the gallery ceiling, cascading down like beaded curtains, delineating space like privacy screens in a hospital waiting room. For this version, to be displayed at the Small Arms Inspection Building in a group exhibition curated by Noa Bronstein, sachse was commissioned to make the largest version yet: more than 40,000 straws that would float like a levitating minimalist sculpture in the centre of the space. The work is monumental, but emerged, like many of sachse's best artworks, from a joke, made over coffee with their friend Eliza Chandler about the risks undertaken by people with disabilities who need to drink hot beverages through bendy straws. Chandler insisted they should be called "freedom tubes."  

As they so often did, sachse recruited those around the table to help with the assembly, never failing to mention that their own output in straw-building could not be surpassed. "I maintain a speed of 500 straws an hour," they once wrote. "No one competes in a medium like this, because it is not really seen as a medium at all." While we worked, sachse told me about their ambivalence about contemporary feminism and their interest in poetry as a shortcut to engage people in politics. Most of all, they made me laugh, and laughed in turn in a full belly chuckle they shared freely with everyone. 

It was the beginning of a tentative friendship that blossomed in the last two years, especially, as we began to write together about sachse's practice. But in many ways, I felt like I already knew them — that everyone in the Toronto arts community did — because sachse did so many things. Across performance, poetry, dance, sculpture, music and social media (where they posted prolifically under the Facebook handle Goldman Sachse, and as @squirrelofmystery on Instagram), sachse was a renowned and influential disability activist, housing rights agitator, pool shark and the unofficial mayor of Parkdale. "jes explored so many mediums, I couldn't even keep up sometimes," curator and artist Sean Lee told me. "And they always approached everything with such radical freedom."

sachse's sudden and unexpected death of a brain aneurysm on May 9 at the age of 40 still doesn't seem real to their many friends and collaborators. "When I heard that they passed, it was flattening and crushing because they seemed to be somebody that — even though I know there are many ways that they struggled, and that they faced serious precarity in their life, and I know from talking with them about how difficult things could be — it just felt like they would burn forever," said writer and producer Sean O'Neill. "It felt like they would outlast all of us." 

Most people's first exposure to sachse's work was as a collaborator and subject of American Able (2010), a series of photographs made by Holly Norris that spoofed the supposed inclusivity of the American Apparel clothing company's billboard ads. Installed in St. Patrick subway station for Contact Photography Festival, and profiled (for good and for ill) by Vice, the images inserted sachse's visibly disabled body into otherwise conventional fashion shoot scenarios. The public reaction to the works was massive (sachse dryly responded to the controversy, "This is not an ad for 'Hug a Cripple Day.' It's satire. It's a photograph"). The series was the first disability artwork that artist, curator and disability activist Carmen Papalia remembers seeing before graduate school, inspiring some of his future work.

sachse identified as disabled, as trans, as deaf, as queer and as working class, but also as a white settler who had the privileges of a post-secondary education (in poetry from Trent University) and access to art institutions. Their small stature meant they were often misrecognized as a child, and they had a special affinity for children and animals. As someone with a visible disability, they felt a kinship with these non-adult and non-human beings who navigated inhospitable city environments. sachse once wrote: "Having a rare genetic condition with a very visible marker has and continues to be a lifelong negotiation, mostly with space. 'Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome,' as an explanation, has felt about as dysphoric a descriptor as being transgender has — the names of two dead white male doctors who 'discovered' the genetic mutation … forever attached to my own name is as colonial as limiting gender to male/female and other in the western world."

They used these differences, and these tensions between identities, to great comedic effect across multiple performances in the regular stand-up comedy/performance series Doored, which ran at Double Double Land in Toronto's Kensington Market from 2012 to 2017. But they also took aim at the institutional politics of access in serious, sustained interventions. 

When the newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario opened, sachse noticed the hallmark central atrium, Walker Court, focused all visual attention on Frank Gehry's spectacular, spiraling, cedar staircase, but left no way for visitors with disabilities to traverse the space. A ramp offers those in wheelchairs a way down into the courtyard, but no exit point on the other side — an inaccessible symbol of access. Their frustration with this oversight led to To Be Frank (2017), eight unauthorized performances where sachse booked a wheelchair from the museum's coat check — one of the few accessibility measures provided by the AGO — and walked it up and down the ramp, in endless circles, in the gallery for one hour.  

"As someone who experienced housing instability, jes was always making space for other groups of people — low income, unhoused and drug users — with their work, getting at this central issue, which is that [the art museum] is not accessible and not equitable," Papalia told me by phone from Vancouver. "And something not being accessible could add to a feeling of one not having a place in the world."

For Undeliverable, a 2022 exhibition Papalia curated across the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and Tangled Art + Disability gallery in Toronto, sachse created a dance performance that used grab bars — the kind typically found in accessible bathroom stalls — installed along the walls and stretching up toward the ceiling, pushing at the limits of museum accessibility measures. When they agreed to participate as a dancer and collaborator for Lido Pimienta's Lido TV on CBC that same year, sachse insisted on another kind of "deliverable" from O'Neill and the production team: that the artist be given the time to write a lyrical, nuanced and very funny description of the performances, to be used as the (usually utilitarian) closed captioned described video for the show. 

"All of my favourite artists are people who think about everything — there's no aspect of expression and the way that it could be received that isn't considered. jes was one of those 'everything' artists," O'Neill shared with me. "They're thinking about the aesthetics, they are thinking about the political dimension, they're thinking about the different bodies who might encounter the work. Their thoughtfulness never ended. It was infinite."

When sachse decided to re-mount To Be Frank in November 2023, it was in response to the departure of Wanda Nanibush, the AGO's inaugural curator of Indigenous art, seemingly in reaction to donor outcry about her public support of the sovereignty of Palestinian peoples. Each week, sachse arrived at the AGO's Free Wednesday night — a program designed to increase access to the museum for those who can't afford the price of admission — and resumed their laps around Walker Court with a wheelchair. They asked me to join them, and to write about the work together. Each week, sachse added a new visual component: a placard they wore across their chest, a t-shirt emblazoned with the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the act of cutting up watermelon on the sidewalk outside and serving it to visitors in the lineup.

They also added an iPad, livestreaming the performance from the seat of the wheelchair for the "spoonies at home." Their activism had taught them about the limited ways people with disabilities were included in protest culture — something they wanted to push back against with this version, which continued weekly until March 2024, when the museum's installation and security staff went on strike and sachse took the performance to the picket line. ("An unwaged artist for Palestine," their sign read.)  

At home, sachse was engaged in a protracted legal fight to prevent their eviction from their rented home in Parkdale — one they went on to win. They endured the unexpected loss of a sibling; the end of a long-term, long-distance relationship; and the ongoing everyday realities of trying to survive solely on Ontario Disability Support Program payments. Despite their professional successes as an artist, their life was marked by economic and physical precarity. 

Amid all these losses and difficulties, sachse remained politically active supporting others. As artist, activist and scholar Syrus Marcus Ware told me, "jes was always the first person there to help, to volunteer, to show up in support of any of the organizing that we were doing with Black Lives Matter Toronto, to show up with any of the organizing that we were doing around trans justice. jes was always the first person to ask, 'What do you need? How can I help?'"

One of their best-known works is a series of gold plaques, resembling the ones museums put on display to acknowledge donors' names. Instead, theirs read, "i need a minute." sachse would install these by the hundreds in exhibitions like Undeliverable, but also gift them to friends, creating a currency of attention, care and access that extended beyond the museum.

"i need a minute was about asking people for something that they didn't have: time, slowness, time to contemplate these inequities, these injustices, this violence toward people like sachse, people with disabilities," Papalia said. "It's a huge loss that jes has gone. I think it just points to the fact that we need to cherish disabled people. We have to support them. We have to meet them where they're at and not have them fit or bend to meet the demands and the standards of dominant culture, but accept their standards of living, accept their quality of life that they desire." 

sachse was known amongst curators for being exacting, difficult and unable to meet deadlines (for many years, their email signature read, "what is time"). As their friend and collaborator, artist Jessica Karuhanga, wrote to me: "Many perceived their demands or dissent as incessant. However, it is a profound gift to have known someone so fiercely devoted to the most vulnerable and discarded among us.... Too often, we are too proud or guarded to engage in the necessary reparative work, especially in environments where our worth is based on our cultural contributions and social norms. [jes] understood that our value goes beyond these frameworks."

After To Be Frank's new version ended, our ability to work together stalled, and sachse and I fell into an uneasy silence. A few months later, I reached out to them to tell them I was thinking of them, to ask how they were doing. We reconnected. They apologized. I apologized. We laughed. The next day, they texted me in their trademark stream-of-consciousness, speech-to-text style: "One of my favourite feelings and maybe there is that perfect specific word for it in a language that is not English is when okay maybe a lot is hard in life but this one moment of this one day reminds you of the joy of being alive that is unencumbered by 'raison d'etre' or thesis of self it just is. It was so nice to hear yer voice today buddy. An afternoon that feels like the palm of a hand"

We do, indeed, need more poetry. And I, like so many others, feel the absence of sachse's acutely