Jonas Joan

born in 1936

filmmaker, videographer, performer, sculptor, visual artist, director-en-scene

Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. Her training included different artistic forms, from sculpture to dance to drawing, and it is not until 1971 that she really starts to focus on video performance. Recognized as a pioneer of videoart, Joan Jones has based her research on reconstructing the hegemonic links between the recognition of the body as artistic object and the individualization of the self. Her work is full of symbolic significance that is materialized through gesture and objects that she incorporates throughout her work. The mirror is an example, sometimes used as a symbolic element in her dramaturgies or, on other occasions, to establish a game of spatial confrontations, as in the work Leftside Rightside 1972.

Joan Jonas' most important contribution as an artist in the video art world is, without a doubt, the way she knew how to use the video medium, exhaustively exploring its specificities, trying to break and dislocate the video space; in her work Vertical Roll 1973, which reflects conquered territory. During this period she collaborates with Richard Serra, as well as with Trisha Brown from whom she learns the infinite possibilities of using the body in dance. Throughout the 70s, Joan Jonas produced a series of works, Two Women, Barking and Three Returns, completing this productive period with Disturbance and Glass Puzzle, taking further the perceptive effects of direct experimentation, adding drama that could perfectly combine her sculptural vision with her theatrical vision. The work from this period inaugurates the synchronicity of disciplines that had developed separately. However, over time, the magic and the ritualistic contents of her performances, exuberant clothes, exotic masks and ornamentation, are verbalized around a language that is so hermetic that it did no more than increase the distance between her and the public. "My works are about the communication between me and myself" Joan Jonas says. She has always seen her work as a bridge between two worlds that usually are so different as to be irreconcilable, using video to construct a field of experiences where it is possible to merge her autobiography with science fiction, as she was interested in creating realities in which the narrative sheds itself of its metrics and adapts itself to the sculptural elements of its work.

source:http://www.mediatecaonline.net/mediatecaonline/SConsultaAutor?ID_IDIOMA=en&ope=2&criteri=Jonas%2C+Joan