Awards
2005 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of performance, installation, and video art and has maintained her position in these genres since the late 1960s. Her continuing influence has been crucial to the development of the postmodern aesthetic in contemporary art. From the beginning, she created a poetic voice through development of a compelling visual vocabulary. The choreography of her intricate performance works developed over time into video installations, which resonate with her early interest in sculpture.
Exploiting the interlocking potential of gestural movement and narrative, Jonas has examined the self, the body, and female identity. The many recurring themes that are the foundation of her work make use of symbolic objects and props, including masks, mirrors, costuming, blackboards, and other sculptural elements. These are connected in spatial environments reminiscent of stage sets with projections and sound.
Joan Jonas, Twilight, 1975–2003, archival gelatin print, 8½ x 13 in., edition of 5 (photograph provided by Yvonne Lambert, New York)
In a recent interview with Robert Ayers, Jonas commented: “How do you make an image? Well, I think about poetry when I think about images. How do you construct? It’s like a haiku: you put one thing next to another and it makes something else, a third thing. That's what I mean when I say ‘poetry.’ All of my work is concerned with that. That's how I work.”
Committee: Austin I. Collins, University of Notre Dame, chair; Todd Ayoung, independent artist; Josely Carvalho, independent artist; and Margot Lovejoy, Purchase College, State University of New York.
