04/18/2024
Joan Jonas (born in 1936) has been bending genres since the 1960s, and at eighty-seven, she is still going. Jonas began studying art history, then she earned an MFA in sculpture, and after that, she just started experimenting. She has worked with performance and dance, video and installation, mythical storytelling, and more recently, environmental art. Across all mediums, her abiding interest is the concept of space: “I have a general relation to space, and it’s always the first thing I think of. I look at a space, and I put things in it. I move in the space, and I develop it,” she says. By “developing space,” Jonas creates immersive experiences that layer her mediums in an almost alchemical way. The end result is a magical “total work of art.” Indeed, to enter the mind of Joan Jonas, you must leave the rest of the world behind. It’s a lovely way to spend an hour or two
