Joan Jonas: Infernal Paradise / The Juniper Tree

05.Apr.08 - 18.May.08
Thu-Sat 11-6, Sun 12-6 or by appt

Wilkinson Gallery
50-58 Vyner Street
London E2 9DA
020 8980 2662
info@wilkinsongallery.com
www.wilkinsongallery.com
Tube Bethnal Green, Hackney / Bethnal Green

Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present a solo show by the acclaimed performance, video and installation artist, Joan Jonas.

The exhibition premieres a new installation, entitled Infernal Paradise, alongside The Juniper Tree (1976). Whilst taking inspiration from Dante, Infernal Paradise is not merely a visually seductive retelling of the story. It instead uses the classic’s themes to transform the gallery space into an immersive presentation of filmed footage taken from a performance and Jonas’ own travels. Five screens and a monitor display subtlety intercut film scenes- which include a shadow performance piece, a Mexican Modernist stone circle, a toy museum and an archive Jonas performance- which, though ambiguous in their meaning individually, assume an energetic aesthetic language when taken as whole.
Mirroring Dante’s orbiting Circles of Hell the viewer is invited to allow the screens to act as orbiting windows to alternate realities and cultures. Juxtaposed against the European narrative base the footage is simultaneously otherworldly and familiar. A car journey around Mexico City is interspersed with a female interacting with a glass hand mirror amongst a modernist stone circle; the toys in the toy museum have their inbuilt sense of nostalgia knocked by their high concentration, becoming both cozy and unsettling; an archive film of a street improvisation performance by Jonas from 1976 gives a historical insight into the artist’s career yet retains its original, ethereal, and perhaps disturbing impact. Within the films, ongoing motifs, that have remained a constant in the artist’s visual language, reappear: the mirror, the mask, the cone, the dog, the hoop; each containing their own history in the wider narrative of Jonas’s oeuvre. Choreographed together the films present an all-encompassing alternate world, taking from Dante, from the familiar and from the artist’s previous body of work.