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Joan Jonas, Mirror Improvisation, 2005 Video, colour, sound, continuous loop Duration: 6 min 33 sec Performers: Ragani Haas, Joan Jonas, Zina. Music by Jason Moran
Screening
Joan Jonas, Mirror Improvisation, 2005 | Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite
24 Mar 2020 – 30 Mar 2020
Regular hours
- Tue, 24 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wed, 25 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thu, 26 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Fri, 27 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sat, 28 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sun, 29 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Mon, 30 Mar
- 10:00 – 18:00
Address
- 1st Floor, 18 Brewer Street
- London
England - W1F 0SH
- United Kingdom
Almost 20 years after programming the Video Project Space at 242 Cambridge Heath Road which ran from May 2001 – April 2002, Amanda Wilkinson announces the Video Project, Part II : Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite.
One work will be presented on Vimeo each week.
About
To access the video, please subscribe to the gallery mailing list:
https://amandawilkinsongallery.com/mailing-list/
This piece includes many iconographical elements that have evolved in Jonas’s practice since the early 1970s, including the mirror, the hoop and the dog. It epitomises her inventive approach to editing and an illusionistic style characterised by a wry humour. She has described the work as follows: The video is shot entirely in a convex mirror like a fisheye lens, it reflects two women in pink tutus and tall green paper hats, moving about on a sloping field by the woods. Their movements are animated by changes of speed. They arrange and rearrange the objects in a still life in an accelerated, then slowed-down play of comic interactions: old grey sawhorses, paper flags, round and square hammers, swards metal hoops, buoy. All the while, the white dog jumps about as she joins the game. A series of actions working with mirrors and objects are performed. Finally they engage in a mock sword fight and
then hurry rapidly into the distance.
A note on The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
Mirror Improvisation is one of three independent single-channel video works that appear in the performance The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things 2004 – 2006. (The others are Wolf Lights, 2004-5 and Melancholia, 2004.) This project refers to the historian Aby Warburg, whom Jonas became interested in when she discovered a text he had written about the Hopi Snake Dance, which she herself had witnessed personally in the 1960s. The text for the performance (commissioned by Dia Beacon, New York) is a collage composed of quotations from Warburg’s notes for a lecture delivered in 1923 to doctors at a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to demonstrate that he had recovered from a nervous breakdown. His memories lead him back to the forests of Northern Europe, which are evoked by the imagery of Mirror Improvisation, although the video was actually filmed in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Senga Nengudi on Joan Jonas
https://www.diaart.org/media/watch-listen/video-senga-nengudi-on-joan-jonas/media-type/video
Silke Otto-Knapp on Joan Jonas
https://www.diaart.org/media/watch-listen/video-silke-otto-knapp-on-joan-jonas/media-type/video
Joan Jonas by R.H. Quaytman
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joan-jonas
