Parallel Universes
Les Joynes (US)
Born California, 1963. Lives and works in New York and Taiwan.
A native of Southern California, I grew up in the forest where I was inspired by legends of mythical creatures that roamed the deep green forests that rippled like tectonic waves eastward in seemingly endless peaks and valleys.
As a contemporary artist, I weave storytelling and oral traditions as inspirations for my creative practice where I engage forgotten realms as a central topic of my research. I merge oral traditions, folklore, mythology and performance that examine memory and forgetting. I explore mythologies through spoken encounters with local inhabitants. I combine these narratives would be paired with photographs, poems and video performances depicting “gateways” between magical and everyday/ quotidian realms.
Les Joynes, Odin (2008), Nordic Artists Center and Amotgaard Museum, Norway
I have created five projects around collective memory. In Brazil and Mongolia, I collaborated with a local shamans to transform a museum space into an animistic spiritual temple and gateway between worlds. In Norway, as Nordic Artist Center (NKD) resident artist I exhibited “Parallel Universes” (2008) a multimedia series at Amotgaard Museum which explored how Nordic deities shape-shift from human to animal and travel among different dimensions through Ygdrassil, the Tree of Life. For this exhibition, I created a objects that symbolized the vehicles for time travel (a ship, a horse, a multiple-headed creature) fashioned from local and found objects (pine boards, cut out wood shapes from local red barn siding). In Mongolia I conducted Fulbright-Hays fieldwork on local shamanism and in the Khovsgol region near Siberia created performances inspired by animistic practices of the local nomadic peoples.
Shifting outside the human. Video still from Shapeshifter. 2014 © FormLAB and ARS, New York and DACS, London. CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award.
In St Petersburg in 2017 I photographed “absence” in the spaces of disappeared Soviet monuments. Through dialogue with local inhabitants, I discovered these monuments continued to exist in collective memory. A guest within tribal communities in Nagaland in Northeastern India in 2022, I learned how Nagas indexed themselves in their othering by current and past central government.
I explore the echoes of human existence reverberated in nature, urban centers and in between. It explores the lifecycles of human existence in sites including their remnants and residual histories as well as the transience of what it means to identify as human. Indexing dystopian film genres of Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleisher, 1973) Joynes is now exploring the creation of miniature biosphere that can be spread through a city as an app connected expanded museum - each a “slice” of flora and sonic biodiversity stored in nodes or modules that become living museums that create sites of post-human manufactured memory within mega-urban centers.
Image from a former site of a Lenin monument, now a hotel lobby in St. Petersburg “Where is Lenin?” (2014) a chromogenic print series created in St. Petersburg on Monuments and their Absence. 2017 © FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London
Exploring human lives in remote locations: Mongolia. Still from Buryiat (2014). CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award. 2014 © FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London.
FormLAB China - use of defunct architecture - Improvising team sports on the Great Wall © 2017 FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London
Biography
Les Joynes (born 1963) is a sculptor and multi-media visual artist based in New York, USA.
Born in Santa Barbara, California, Joynes trained as a sculptor and multi-media artist in London at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, and in Tokyo at Musashino Art University. Joynes is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award (2022), Japan Ministry of Education and Culture (MeXT) Scholarship (1997-2001), University of the Arts London Fellow at the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (2015), the NKD Fellowship (2008), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016), Bauhaus Artist Fellow (2008-2009), Edwin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum (2009), and the King Sturge Sculpture Prize, London (1995). He is currently based in Taiwan for two artistic research projects examining Taiwanese mythologies and art.
Meeting Andy Warhol in New York in the 1980s he was inspired by Warhol and his factory as a space ability to “flip” the way we perceive art in its relationship with consumerism. He was also inspired by artists Josef Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and philosophers Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham and Julia Kristeva in their exploration of the relationships of power, observer and abject spaces.
In the 1990s, inspired by Gordon Matta Clark and Jason Rhoades, he began excavating structures amid demolition rescuing objects, books, masonry to excavate from the abandoned factories and warehouses in London’s Isle of Dogs, sites that were used as film locations for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In London and Japan he worked with formless materials including pigmented polyurethane creating objects that attempted to defy sculptural norms and sensibilities and created forests of giant globular slip-cast polyurethane flowers for exhibitions in Korea and the UK. This emerged as FormLAB in London in 1997, where he began assembling collaborative teams to turn the studio (and later, the museum) inside out, re-lensing and shifting the ordered and predicable experiences of spectatorship. At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paolo, Brazil he installed FormLAB as a museum-within-a-museum where within a central studio module he would continuously tamper with and remake the works displayed in FormLAB’s museum exhibition to destabilize the experience of the spectator and question when, if ever, a work of art is really finished. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist he examined facets of South Asian and Himalayan identity. He was CEC ArtsLink grantee to explore monuments and absence in post-Soviet Russia including abandoned Cold-War era Soviet listening posts outside of Berlin. He was University of the Arts London Research Fellow at the UAL Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and served on the Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” curatorial team in 1997. He is one of the founding editors for ProjectAnywhere, a peer-reviewed journal on artistic research at University of Melbourne Australia and Parsons School of Design in New York and is a Fellow at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
During his MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths, he studied under conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin and later under Japanese sculptor Hideyuki Mogami while Monbukakusho Scholar (1997-2001) completing his masters in fine art (in Japanese) at Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Moving to New York in the early 2000s he also studied technique under the American pop artist James Rosenquist (1933-2017). Joynes earned his PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; and Post-Doctorate (2017) in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil. He created cross-disciplinary collaborative research with Brazilian artists indexing indigenous and syncretic rituals and art-making. Joynes has exhibited at the Barbican, London, the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Paris, Milch Gallery, London, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Mongolia Zanabazar National Museum of Fine Art Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Museum of Brazilian Arts Brazil, Åmotgård Museum, Norway, Norimatsu Museum, Japan CBGB, New York, Art Fair Tokyo and Fenberger House, Nagano, Japan.Website: www.Lesjoynes.com.