Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas is a trailblazing artist who was at the helm of emerging video and performance art during the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Happenings scene of downtown New York. Originally trained as a sculptor, Jonas shifted to performance as it served as a fluid arena to blend her interests in architecture, theatre, dance, music, film and literature. This methodology also enabled Jonas to develop a catalogue of alter egos and ongoing narratives to use within her pieces, with the character Organic Honey for example, surfacing throughout five decades of film as an “electronic erotic seductress”. Often working collaboratively with composers, other artists, or choreographers such as Gordon Matta Clark, Yvonne Rainer or Richard Serra, the early pieces were often performed outside, directly reacting to the barren “holes” within New York City at the time— shooting at docklands, piers, or alleyways. Other iconic series include The Mirror Pieces (1969), where women would hold up mirrors against their bodies, their images reflected and refracted back at one another, meditating on self-image and the fragmentation of the feminine. Drawing is also an integral element of her process. Whilst preparing for a new piece, Jonas will gesturally draw with ink, paint, or chalk, emulating the same image ad infimum. This act is duplicated during live pieces, with sketches being the primary method of communication within her performances. Despite what medium or methodology Jonas employs, her pieces are innately innovative and experimental.