Joan Jonas

Since the late 1960s, Joan Jonas (b. 1936 New York. Lives and works in New York) has created groundbreaking multidisciplinary works that investigate time-based structures and the politics of spectatorship.  Her projects often simultaneously incorporate elements of theater, dance, sound, text, drawing, sculpture, and video projection. They rely on alternate identities, narrative symbols and threads, but they also refuse linearity, privileging instead the doubled and fractured tale. Initially trained as a sculptor, by the late 1960s she became known for her work in performance, and completed her first film work, Wind, in 1968. A pioneer of video art, Jonas began using the Portapak video system in 1970 to explore the shifts that occur from the camera to the projection to the body and the space of the live action. For her recent videos, performances, and installations, Jonas has frequently collaborated with musicians and dancers and has drawn from literary sources and mythic tales in realizing her multi-layered explorations.