Denesuline photographer Jake Kimble (He/Him, They/Them) embraces humour as a tool for healing, connection, and reflection in processing grief and navigating memory.
My Bones Are Funny, Sometimes They Ache presents the breakout artist’s recent works, including video, paper towel prints, self-portraits, and beadwork. Through self-portraiture, Kimble engages the body as a site of honesty and repair, where vulnerability becomes a form of resistance. His photographs and videos extend beyond personal narrative to reflect broader Indigenous experiences of loss, care, and renewal. In tracing these connections, Kimble’s work reveals that to laugh, to ache, and to remember are not separate gestures but part of the same ongoing act of survival.
The phrase “ache in one’s bones” holds the dual weight of humour and grief, youth and age. The exhibition themes capture this doubleness: the funny bone, a site of laughter and pain, is also the aching bone, a reminder of time’s passage and the inevitability of growth. To ache is to feel deeply, and in Kimble’s practice, that ache becomes a record of survival and self-care—an embodied archive of the experiences that continue to shape him.
Photo Credit Line: Detail from My Guardian Angel is Tired Photo Courtesy of the Artist
