Posthuman as Site

Les Joynes (US)

Born California, 1963. Lives and works in New York and New Delhi.

Current Research

His current project Invisible Human explores 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.

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).

Early life and education

Joynes was born in Santa Barbara, California. 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.

Joynes finished his BA with honors in History at Boston University in and M.Sc. from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. Completing his BA (Hons) Fine Art (1996) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London he studied under minimalist sculptors Stephen Furlonger and David Annesley and was selected to study under French sculptor Jean Cardot at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1995).

During his MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths, he studied under conceptual artist and painter 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).

Examining new forms of experimental and collaborative art practices, 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.

Work

First exhibiting at eighteen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art at the age of eighteen, 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.

Since 1979 Joynes has explored found objects as ready-mades and photographed Southern Californian track-home garages as ready-made installations. Later in the early 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.

Invited by art critic, essayist Jonathan Crary in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia, Joynes continued to build his practice to explore power relations between the museum, the observer and the art object.

In 2012 he began to turn the museum inside out, re-lensing and shifting the ordered and predicable experiences of museum spectatorship inside-out. 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.

Also involved in artistic research he explores the tandem processes of experimental art-making and critical interpretation. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist he is examining how Indian contemporary art indexes Indian classical and folk art forms that have reflected 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. Website: www.Lesjoynes.com.