Mirrors.

Mirrors, masks and video cameras have in extent been Joan Jonas trademarks. Also characteristic of her work is the combination of multiple mediums, including dance, music, entire film, live closed circuit videos and prerecorded tapes, braces and drawings. She may focus forward the body, in urban or pastoral, indoor or outdoor spaces, and her narratives may be borrowed from other cultures

Jonas, now in her late 60 and a much-respect installation, performance and video artist, was a member of the groundbreaking landed estate of downtown New York experimental artists, dancers, performers, filmmakers and composer in the late 1960 and '70 which included Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Whitman and Philip Glass, Like them, Jonas, although specifically trained (as a sculptor, in her case), acknowledged no categorical biases. She wrote in a 1983 statement, that she "didn't papal court a major difference between a metrical composition a sculpture, a film, or a dance." (1) radical at the time, her fine disregard is now the norm, shared by way of artists as varied as Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and entreat de Beer.

Still based in strange York but often traveling far in search of material for her performances and installations, Jonas is arguably common of the best of her generation of artists--which is high praise, considering the accomplishments of that generation. She continues to make compounded uncompromising, innovative work, spurred according to an eclectic and fearlessly idiosyncratic vision. Despite showing steadily in the United States since the '70 with a retrospective at the Berkeley University Art Museum in 1980 she has been particularly admired in Europe where she has participated in several Documents and has had retrospectives of her work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994 the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart, in 2000 and the Neue Galerie fur Bildende Kunst Berlin, in 2001

In the past not many years she has recaptured the attention of the just discovered York art world, her work singled without in critically acclaimed group exhibitions of the like kind as P.S. 1's "Video Acts" (2002-03) and the Whitney Museum's "Into the Light" (2001-02) culminating in her modern widely admired exhibition at the Queen Museum. It was organized by means of Valerie Smith, the museum's director of exhibitions, who initiated the exhibit "Joan Jonas: Five Works" (something of a misnomer) not absented 35 years of her art, from Wind (1968) an important early performance, filmed upon a beach by Peter Campus (5 minutes, black and white), to the novel multimedia extravaganzas Revolted by the speculation of known places ... Sweeney Astray (1992/2003) and Lines in the Sand: Helen of Egypt (2002) The latter, a performance and installation commissioned for Documenta XI, was performed at The Kitchen in Chelsea last February, attendant with the Queens exhibition, it was her first performance in of recent origin York in a decade--and utterly illuminating.

"Five Works" (the title enumerates only the installations) was not chronologically arranged, becoming to the museum's architectural constraints. Nevertheless, it was evident that from Jonas's first public performances in 1968 and her first videotapes in 1971 onward, she has made her productions increasingly elaborate, multifaceted, technologically sophisticated and theatrical. Her cumulative proces acquires deeper resonance with each just discovered piece. Just as she recycle her talismanic thing perceiveds she returns again and again to themes of self and other, the proximity of the mythic and the real, and elemental motifs of wind and water, earth and fire.

Jonas's signature figure of speech certainly from the mid-'70s forward is to interweave and layer the mystical and the everyday in allegories flamed by dint of current events. She interconnects "de-synchronized" (Douglas Crimp's often-quot descriptive time for Jonas's method) fragments in a series of mirrorings and transformations of disparate successions that lead from one image to another, the same meaning into the next. (2) In Jonas's vulnerable domain, the narrative is nonlinear, turned and unstable. Memories and dreams grow forward and backward, turn above and over, tumble through different flats of the conscious and unconscious.

Jonas formerly wrote that an idea could follow to her just from staring at a space until it blurred; then she would begin working, starting with a prop--"such as a mirror, cone a TV a story." (3) the same of the earliest works at the Queen Museum, shown as a projection, was Mirror. Filmed in her loft in 1968 it was a simple exercise of naked men and women walking back and forth, in and gone out of range of the camera len holding mirrors at various angles and positions in relation to their bodies. It introduced greatly of what would preoccupy Joints for the nearest three decades: reflection, doubling, repetition, marking and mapping space with stylized, task-oriented mental actions fracturing perception as Smithson did with his mirrors. remarkably soon, in the pivotal video Mirror Check (1970 not in the show) she employed the mirror--and camera--on herself. She is seen sliding a small cylindrical mirror slowly down her naked dead body looking into it the entire time, seeing a "succession of places unfolding in time." (4) Jonas said she was greatly struck through the discrepancies between what the mirror, the camera and the viewer saw.