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21/3/2013

Joan Jonas & Gina Pane

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

curator Dean Daderko

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane brings together a selection of works by two artists born a short time apart who are renowned for their foundational contributions to the field of performance art. Jonas and Pane were proto-feminist artists, working in New York and Paris respectively, who worked multidisciplinarily at a time when many of their peers focused their attentions on a single medium. Through selections of their sculpture, photography, video, drawing, installation, and live arts, Parallel Practices celebrates the shared and complementary aspects of Jonas’ and Pane’s art, and highlights the differences that characterize their unique bodies of work. Parallel Practices also marks the first comprehensive exhibition of Gina Pane’s work in the United States.

Joan Jonas' (b. 1936, New York City) experiments with video are among the earliest and most enduring investigations of this medium. Jonas owned the first Sony Porta Pak video recorder in the United States, which she acquired on a trip to Japan in 1970. Her performances for the camera offer viewers an intimate view of the artist's creative process. Early video works like Good Night Good Morning (1976) investigate the relationships between physical, temporal, and televisual space; day after day, she repeatedly greets a video camera while monitoring her image on a television and recording it for later viewing. The combination of moving images and sculpture is a hallmark of Jonas’ work. Parallel Practices features Jonas' most recent video installation, Reading Dante III (2010) in which literary narrative provides an inspiration for a multi-channel video installation that blurs the boundaries between the inside and outside of the filmic frame. In addition, beginning May 4, Jonas’ performance work Mirror Check (1970) will be presented in CAMH’s Brown Foundation Gallery on Saturdays at 2PM.

Gina Pane's (b. 1939, Biarritz – d. 1990, Paris) early works include a series of physical interventions in pastoral landscapes that are documented in sequences of still images. They anticipate the performance works—or actions as she called them in her native French—that later brought her widespread acclaim. Pane is best known for performances in which self-inflicted wounds were meant to shock her audience out of complacent states. For Action Escalade non-anesthésiée [Action Non-anaesthetized Climb] (1970) Pane installed a ladder-like metal structure whose rungs were covered with sharpened metal points on a wall of her studio. Grids of photographs document Pane climbing on the structure to the point of exhaustion and are shown alongside the object. Pane’s constats d'action [proofs of action] are unique montages of photographic images, occasionally including drawings and notations,with which the artist contextualized her actions. Pane considered the constats d’action as autonomous works and not mere documentation; they extend the life of her performances and communicate their sensibilities. Pane’s final series of works, the Partitions, transform Christian iconography into abstract expressions of otherworldly concerns. Saint Sébastien, Saint Pierre, Saint Laurent – Partition pour trois portraits [St. Sebastian, St. Pierre, St. Lawrence – Partition for Three Portraits] (1986) addresses the martyrdoms of these saints with an alchemical materiality.

PUBLICATION
Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the intersections of Jonas' and Pane's practices. It includes texts by art historians Dr. Barbara Clausen, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Anne Tronche, as well as a text by the exhibition's curator, Dean Daderko. Significantly, this publication is among the first considerations of Pane's work to be published in English and includes translations of crucial texts by the artist. Designed by AHL&CO, the catalogue features a checklist of works included in the exhibition, full-color reproductions and installation views of the CAMH exhibition, biographies of the artists, and a bibliography of related readings. The catalogue will be distributed by Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.).

This catalogue is made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc.

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane is supported by generous grants from Cullen Geiselman, Louise Jamail, Yvon Lambert, kamel mennour, the Union Pacific Foundation, and CAMH's Major Exhibition funders. The catalogue is made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc.

Press contact:
Connie McAllister - Director of Community Engagement 713 2848255 cmcallister@camh.org

Opening Reception: Friday, March 22, 2013 | 7-9PM

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Blvd. Houston, TX 77006
Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday 10am–7pm
Thursday 10am–9pm / Friday 10am–7pm
Saturday 10am–6pm / Sunday 12–6pm
Admission is always free

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