Drawings
Joan Jonas
Shown drawing in her Manhattan studio and performing on stage at the Umeå Jazz Festival in Sweden, Joan Jonas describes her approach to drawing and its role within her overall practice. “Drawing is like practicing the piano, because the first ones that I do often don’t come out so I have to practice,” says Jonas who handicaps herself by attaching her ink brushes and oil sticks to long rods or branches.
“It’s almost accidental if they turn out.” While showing archived drawings of her dogs and an owl, Jonas discusses her interest in capturing an animal’s character through portraiture.
Featured artists
About the artists
A pioneer of performance and video art, Joan Jonas works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational works that are equally at home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present. By wearing masks in some works, and drawing while performing on stage in others, she disrupts the conventions of theatrical storytelling to emphasize potent symbols and critical self-awareness. From masquerading in disguise before the camera to turning mirrors on the audience, she turns doubling and reflection into metaphors for the tenuous divide between subjective and objective vision, and the loss of fixed identities.
