Joan Jonas

westlondonprojects is pleased to announce an exhibition by Joan Jonas, a highly regarded representative of the influential group of artists from 1960’s and 1970’s New York City. Acknowledged as a pioneer of performance, video and installation, Jonas combines rigorous formal structure with refined personal cosmology. Influenced variously by Noh theatre, modern poetry, and filmic montage, Jonas’s polymorphic works are generously expressed in poetic fragmentary offerings.

For the exhibition, several pieces from the 1970’s and 1990’s have been chosen to emphasise Jonas’s exceptional activation of space through performance; including drawings and video based works.

westlondonprojects is simultaneously hosting the launch of Susan Morgan’s, Joan Jonas, I Want to live in the Country (And Other Romances.) by Afterall Books. The video from 1976 which the book is based on will be part of the exhibition.

As part of this event Joan Jonas will be in conversation with Bettina Funcke from Dia Art Foundation in New York, for which the artist recently produced a major performance.

In addition to the work featured in Morgan’s book, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances), 1976, the exhibition features two other video based works. My New Theatre II, 1998 presents a single channel video work shown in an artist designed black wooden viewing box. Visiting themes of repetition and mirroring, the work incorporates chalk drawings made on slate and canvas, which are produced within the video. Moving with no Pattern, 1999, is a two-channel video projected on the adjacent walls of a corner. A group of performers ritualistically move and compose temporary sculpture by placing chairs, tables, a rocking horse, sled and other objects in relation to each other. The composition of the space becomes dissolute, confounded by the roving, spinning views of the cameras. Highly formal folding and repeating processes overlay the pleasures of the rhythms implicit in human activity.

Joan Jonas