The Works of Joan Jonas
Screening of THE DANTE SERIES AND MIRAGE
At The 11th Annual Aurora Award

Aurora Picture Show is pleased to announce the works by Joan Jonas that will be screened as part of the 2011 Aurora Award Gala and Dinner.   Pioneer video and performance artist Joan Jonas is the 2011 Aurora Award recipient and will be honored with a celebration that includes an installation screening of Jonas’ READING DANTE SERIES, inspired by the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, and MIRAGE, which was motivated by a trip the artist took to India.

Joan Jonas has a unique connection with Aurora Picture Show and Houston through late video artist Andy Mann. Mann (1949-2001) was a pioneer of video art who left an extensive collection of his video art to Aurora Picture Show, with the desire to have the work distributed and screened for educational and artistic purposes.  Recognized for his groundbreaking camera work, Mann is best known for his street tapes from Access Houston cable and his association with The Art Car Parade. Joan Jonas and Andy Mann worked together in the 1970s, recording one of her performances in New York City.  This footage was used in two of her projects, including the READING DANTE SERIES and MIRAGE. In homage to this link to Aurora and Houston, Joan Jonas will screen an installation of works from both of these projects at the Aurora Award.




ABOUT READING DANTE SERIES
Originally a performance, several iterations of "Reading Dante" have been hosted at locations such as the Performa, and Venice Biennial. "Reading Dante" is based on elements from Dante’s epic fourteenth-century poem “The Divine Comedy,” collaging footage shot in four locations—the Canadian woods, 1970s New York, a ruin surrounding a lava field in Mexico City, and a shadow play in Italy—together to translate Dante into Jonas’s own remarkable “infernal paradise.” It amounts to a multimedia collage with moving parts and a smorgasbord of audio accompaniment. This includes music, loud crashes, traffic noises, and voices reading fragments of the work’s inspiration: the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

In keeping with her roots in the early 1970s Post-Minimalism, the magic of her work is recognized for being so simple and fully disclosed.  Ms. Jonas expands the imaginative reach of any text she tackles, partly by tracing its reflection in the world of things that she brings to unexpected life.




ABOUT MIRAGE
Inspired by a trip the artist took to India, Joan Jonas’s “Mirage” (1976/2005) was originally conceived as a 1976 performance for the screening room of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and later screened at the Museum of Modern Art.  This piece was also originally a performance in which Jonas interacted by carrying out a series of movements, such as running as a form of percussion and as gestural drawing, while interacting with a variety of sculptural components and video projections. In 1994, the artist repurposed these elements—metal cones suggesting the form of volcanoes, videos of erupting volcanoes, wooden hoops, a mask, photographs, and chalkboards, among other items—as a discrete installation, which was itself reconfigured in 2005. At MoMA, Jonas re-imagined the work in an installation with elements of ritual, memory, repetition, and rehearsal with games, drawn actions, and syncopated rhythms.