For this work, staged on a riverfront in Lower Manhattan, fourteen performers struck together pieces of wood, drew shapes on the ground with props, and used mirrors to refract sunlight while an audience watched from afar. The discrepancy between these visible actions and the sounds that reached the audience expresses the depth of the landscape. This was further amplified by the artist’s use of wide-angle and telephoto lenses—the latter enabling close ups—in the resulting film. Songdelay demonstrates Jonas’s interest in space and, in her words, “ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it.”
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, March 17–July 6, 2024
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Joan Jonas
American, born 1936 30 works onlineFew artists can claim to have initiated a new form of art. Joan Jonas, however, was crucial to the formation of two— video and performance .
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