An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas (b. 1937) is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas engages in an elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity. Employing an idiosyncratic vocabulary of ritualized gesture and symbolic objects that include masks, mirrors, and costuming, she explores the self and the body through layers of meaning.
"Wind"
US 1968, 5:37 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video
"Wind" is a performance film, recently restored and newly available on video. Cutting between snowy fields and a raw seashore, Jonas focuses on a group of performers moving through a stark, windswept landscape. Her performers struggle over and over with their fluttering coats, battling the gusts of a wind which, though soundless and invisible, defines the contours of this piece.
"Mirage"
US 1976, 31 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video
On the film "Mirage" Jonas wrote: "For Mirage I made a film of drawing, again and again, images on a blackboard, and then erasing them. Reading the essays collected in Spiritual Disciplines, I got another idea to use drawings, also in Mirage, which I called 'Endless Drawings' after those described in the Melukean Book of the Dead, the tribal ritual book of New Guinea. There it says that in order to go from one world to the next you must finish a drawing in sand which an old lady, the devouring witch, begins at the boundary between life and death."
"Mirage 2"
US 1976-2000, 30 min, b&w, sound
"Mirage 2", which Jonas edited at EAI in 2000 for simultaneous projection with her 1976 film "Mirage", is a montage composed of video dating from the era of the original film and performance. A kaleidoscopic and hypnotic piece, it revisits footage recorded in the 1970s: fragments of off-air television news and commercials, Jonas' chalk-on-blackboard drawings, landscape views in Sardinia, and never-seen documentation of the artist and Pat Steir improvising on the streets of lower Manhattan.
