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Joan Jonas

Mirage
1976/2001

Not on view

Date
1976/2001

Classification
Installations

Medium
16mm film and three-channel video installation, black-and-white, sound and silent, 31 min., 30 min., 14 min., and 12 min. looped

Dimensions
Dimensions variable

Accession number
2002.158

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Film and Video Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Joan Jonas. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Mirage was designed specifically for the screening room of Anthology Film Archives in New York's SoHo neighborhood, where Joan Jonas first performed the piece on several nights over a few weeks in 1976, for an audience of her friends: local artists, musicians, and dancers. In the first performances, Jonas projected images of herself drawing and erasing her marks on a chalkboard—some appropriated from her past works—as well as a five-minute documentary loop of volcanoes erupting and a film of a television turned on its side. She also stepped through a small wooden hoop and completed other live actions. Mirage was the last of a series of black and white video performances completed by Jonas; she would subsequently adopt color technologies. In 2001, Jonas made a new version of Mirage, consisting of a silent, approximately thirty-minute loop which, in the artist’s words, “is a combination of old performances, more chalk drawings and footage shot off the television at that time.”




Sunrise

Sunset

A 30-second online art project:

Peter Burr, Sunshine Monument

Learn more

Learn more at whitney.org/artport