Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy
Joan Jonas
Friday, June 4th - Sunday, June 27th, 2010
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
After three years of exhibitions in our Chinatown gallery, Screening is proud to present its final exhibition: Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, by groundbreaking multi-media artist Joan Jonas.
Following Screening’s exhibition of work by experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill, we conclude our exhibition program with the second of two exhibitions by pioneers of moving-image art—each demonstrating unique visions that have helped to pave the way for moving-image makers in recent decades.
Known for uncompromising experiments that fuse her knowledge of art history, modern theater, dance, sculpture and performance art, as well as Kabuki and Noh theater, Jonas has produced a singular body of work. These influences are on display in her 1972 videotape Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, all filtered through what was, at the time, the newly accessible technology of video production. Jonas’ performance-for-camera is part ritual, part magic show, exploring the possibilities of the female image through alter egos and technological transformation.
New York-based artist Joan Jonas Joan Jonas (b. 1936) was awarded the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award in 1988, and was also the recipient of the 3rd Annual Polaroid Video Art Award in 1987. Jonas has received grants for choreography, video and the visual arts from the New York State Council on the Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Guggenheim Foundation; and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Jonas has performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout the world. In 2004 she was honored with a retrospective at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, entitled Joan Jonas: Five Works. She has also had major retrospectives at Stedelijk Museum and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. Other one-person exhibitions and performances include Kunstmuseum, Bern; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Kitchen, New York; San Francisco Museum of Art; University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; Pat Hearn Gallery and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, among others. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Documentas 5, 6, 8, and 11 in Kassel, Germany; and Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video, among many others.
Jonas 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. Since 2000 she has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
