CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- MIT List Visual Arts Center presents seven seminal film and single-channel video works by pioneering artist and MIT Professor Emerita Joan Jonas, in complement to the List’s presentation of Jonas’s new work made for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Selected from Jonas’s four-decade-long, distinguished career in performance, video, and installation, the works are featured in an intimate exhibition in the List’s Bakalar Gallery from April 7 through July 5, 2015. This exhibition provides important background and context for Jonas’ new work on view simultaneously in Venice, and shares with local audiences the pivotal videos and performances that led to the artist’s selection as the U.S. representative for the 2015 Venice Biennale. The works on view demonstrate the development of her distinctive way of working with performance and video that draws on dance, ritual, and various theatrical traditions. Jonas began to develop her work in relation to the various mediums of mirrors, the distance of landscape, and video the late 1960s, when she was immersed in the post-minimal experiments of New York’s downtown scene.

The exhibition includes Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1972 (17:24 min, b&w, sound), Jonas’s first single-screen tape, which combines her investigation of the representation of femininity using masks, mirrors, and other props, with video’s properties of instant playback. For Good Night Good Morning, 1976 (11:38 min, b&w, sound), the artist recorded herself greeting the camera every night and morning over three different periods of time, thus employing the mechanism to chart a mundane ritual that is rendered simultaneously public and private. For Songdelay, 1973 (18:35 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video) Jonas staged a performance on a large empty lot in lower Manhattan with a cast including artists and dancers such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Steve Paxton. The choreographed series of movements, delayed sounds, and various props introduce elements carried forward throughout Jonas’s work. The film Mirage (1976, 31 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video) shows the artist executing a number of signature, enigmatic chalk drawings, and erasing them immediately after.

In the 1980s, Jonas’s work turned towards more narrative forms, inspired by ancient myths, fairy tales, and literature. Using a range of stylized special effects, Double Lunar Dogs, 1984 (24:04 min, color, sound), based on a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein, envisions the inhabitants of a space ship lost in space for generations. Volcano Saga 1989, (28 min, color, sound), originally produced for television broadcast, stages a retelling of an ancient Icelandic saga while bringing its characters and stories into the present. Lines in the Sand (2002- 2005), the final and most recent work in the exhibition, is a documentation of Jonas’s celebrated performance taking inspiration for H.D.’s poem “Helen of Egypt,” first staged for Documenta 11 in 2002.

Joan Jonas: Selected Films and Videos, 1972-2005 is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY, USA) Jonas is a pioneer of video, performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Jonas’s most recent solo exhibitions include those at HangarBicocca, Milan (Fall 2014); Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu Project Gallery, Japan (2014); Kulturhuset Stadsteatern Stockholm (2013); Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico (2013); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). She has been represented in dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany, six times since 1972, and has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York. Joan Jonas is a New York native and she continues to live and work in New York City. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has taught at MIT since 1998, and is currently Professor Emerita in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.