Opening Saturday, February 2, Wako Works of Art is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Joan Jonas. This will be the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery, and will present a multimedia installation of her most recent work Reanimation, featuring her latest videos, drawings and sculptures.

Born in 1936 in New York, Joan Jonas studied art history at Mount Holyoke and later sculpture at Columbia University; she was involved in the 1960s and 70s experimental dance and performance movement and worked with artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Philip Glass. Jonas works in a variety of mediums in various locations: indoor and outdoor performances; videos through monitors, as well as projected and overlaid; drawings in the studio and in performances; photographs and props documenting the performances that have taken place. Through these wide-ranging forms, Jonas makes references to a plethora of sources, from Icelandic folklore (Volcano Saga, 1985-1989) to H.D and Greek mythology (Lines in the Sand, 2002), to Aby Warburg (The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2005) to formulate her own visual narratives.

Inspired by the 1968 novel Under the Glacier by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness, Reanimation is composed of videos employed in a performance that was first presented at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 2010. The performance then incorporated live camera animation method developed for Reading Dante (which was presented at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008), and overlaying of her earlier videos such as Disturbances (1973) and Melancholia (2005), as well as a collage of objects, images and words. The performance was later staged at documenta 13 at Kassel, Germany in 2012, accompanied by live music of jazz pianist Jason Moran and Glacier, new video shot in the Arctic Circle; Jonas also presented installations in the windows of a small house in Karlsaue Park. The single-room installation at Wako Works of Art is deliberated so that the audience will now experience the work from inside.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous cooperation of Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu.

Please join us for a reception for the artist on Saturday, February 2, from 6 to 8 PM.

» Press Release(PDF)

Joan Jonas’s recent performances include Lines in the Sand at Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), Kitchen, New York and Tate, London (2004); The Shapes, the Scent, the Feel of Things at Dia:Beacon in New York (2005, 2006) and House of World Cultures, Berlin (2008); Reading Dante at the 16th Biennale of Sydney and Yokohama Triennale (2008); and Reanimation at MIT (2010), documenta 13 (2012). She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2006), MACBA, Barcelona (2008) and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009-10). She also has an exhibition They Came to Us Without a Word at CCA Kitakyushu, where she stayed for their artist in residency program.