Joan Jonas
8 June to 28 August 2005
Le Plateau Frac Ile-de-France
corner of the Rue des Alouettes and Rue Carducci
75019 Paris
open Wednesday-Friday from 14:00 to 19:00, Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00
www.fracidf-leplateau.com
(To receive the monthly newsletter, register on the website)
Le Jeu de Paume Site Sully
62 Rue Saint-Antoine
75004 Paris
open Tuesday-Friday from 12:00 to 19:00, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00
www.jeudepaume.org
Le Plateau Frac Ile-de-France and Jeu de Paume Site Sully are pleased to present the first Parisian exhibition of work by Joan Jonas.
A producer of films and videos, a performer who also makes sculptures and drawings, Joan Jonas is one of the most important women artists in the United States. Her work features in many of the worlds most prestigious museums, including MoMA (NYC) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).
Given in galleries, theatres and lofts, inside and outdoors, her performances were quick to make use of film and then video technology in order to give an illusion of spatial depth and to play on the notions of live and recorded action, and thus to challenge viewers perceptions.
Joan Jonas is a pioneer who combines sound, movement and images in order to produce protean, experimental objects.
At the Jeu de Paume Site Sully, a selection of emblematic works, from her first videos of the late 1960s to her latest installations, retraces Joan Jonass very singular career.
These works also give an idea of the themes running through the artists production over those thirty-five years, such as: the place of the body and the relation to urban or rural landscapes (Wind, 1968; Song Delay, 1973), disguise and the question of identity (Organic Honey, 1972-94), the close ties between myth and reality (Organic Honey), and the influence of theatre, whether the Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku (Song Delay and Organic Honey) or the French.
At Le Plateau, Joan Jonas is presenting a historic work, the installation Mirage, as well as a series of her small theatres.
In the same time, she is questioning her own career by engaging in a dialogue with some of the young artists she has met in schools around the world: Narda Fabiola Alvarado (Bolivia), Sung Hwan Kim (Corea), David Maljkovic (Croatia), Seth Price (United States) and Sebastian Diaz Morales (Argentina) in the experimental space.
Described recently by Roberta Smith in The New York Times as the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, Joan Jonas sees this exhibition as a way of confronting the question of artistic inheritance and transmission.
Parallel to these two major exhibitions, the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris (Le Studio space) is showing recent works by Jonas from 28 May to 30 July.
