Les Joynes
A selection of Images submitted in application for teaching on Foundation at Pratt Institute
As a contemporary artist, I create work inspired by local histories and mythologies. Inspired by William Burroughs and Brion Gyson’s concept of a Third Mind (1977) - I explore not only cut-up techniques but also how collaboration can lead to new types of discovery. I founded FormLAB in 1997 as a space to foster this type of experimentation. In my studio-based classes and workshops I encourage students and artists to invent new ways to express an idea or solve a problem. Below I attach a selection of images with brief explanations.
As a Bauhaus Fellow (2008-2009) I explored disappearing communities in the township of Queenstown - one of Singapore’s oldest towns, now a neighborhood. A vibrant community which residents referred to as “the last place that felt familiar in Singapore”. I interviewed residents and learned that Queenstown was scheduled for demolition and rebuilding as part of regular public works. I created in several sites a Disappearing performance where we used long exposure medium format and digital images to trace human presence. This series was published in the Journal for Visual Cultures at University of California in 2011. For this project I worked with thirty fine art and performance students from the Bauhaus (Dessau), Lasalle College of Art and Nanyang Academy of Art in Singapore. The students were from Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil and Germany. Together we created a series of live performances using LED lights and long explore photography to create “ghost” images.
Discovering the Disappearing Neighborhood. FormLAB performances in Queenstown, Singapore
My continued artist research asks the question “How do we see art and how can we engage histories and parallel realms within communities?” How can the museum be woven into the fabric of a community?
As a contemporary artist and visual cultures scholar examine the museum inside-out - exploring not how we could bring people to museums - but how we could bring museums to communities. I explore the relationship of found objects from communities, found movement, found drawings, found assemblages were all part of a community’s language. Then, as now, I explore the ritual aspects of communities - their plans, their orders. The spaces for work, worship and play. The public and the private. The spaces that play to affirm the identity of the community and those global spaces that transgress.
FormLAB (2010). Installed at a defunct factory in Treignac, a village in Central France I worked with a team of students from Goldsmiths as well as visiting artists from Taiwan, France and Russia. Using objects excavated from the ruins of the factory we created a makeshift assembly line to create sculptures.
At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in Sao Paolo, Brazil (2012) I installed FormLAB in the middle of the museum as a space to reconstruct the idea of the museum and spectatorship. Creating work in the daytime that would populate the museum space I would then recall the works and change them so that there was no fixed exhibition.
In 2012 I created a laboratory within the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I collected found objects in local neighborhoods and brought them to the museum for up-cycling - building assemblages from discarded musical instruments, from salvaged computers and the ritual objects from shamanic rituals.
Also at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in Sao Paolo, Brazil I created live performances with the head of a Candomblé community which practices shamanism and animism. Here we merged ritual with artmaking in the creation of artifacts which later exhibited in the museum (video: Kabila, 2012 26 min)
Collaborating with the city of Seoul and art students from Kookmin University and Seoul Art Space we created an exhibition based on recycled toys. (2012)
Exploring shamanism in Nomadic spaces, video exhibition at Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Mongolia (two-channel video 4 min 2014)
Shapeshifter (2014-2015), video from shamanic performance in Northern Mongolia. For this project Worked with local musicians to create a music score and created this performance at a nomadic encampment of Tsaatan reindeer herders at the Border between Mongolia and Siberia.
(2017) Working with students from China I was awarded a grant from Fulbright-Hays and the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Performance to create a bilateral US-China project which exhibited at the Beijing Inside Out Art Museum in Beijing. For this project we created site specific performances in and around Beijing and in Northen China on an abandoned part of the Great Wall.
Minxiong (2023) monochrome print. As a resident artist in Taiwan in Kaohsiung and the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature in Taipei I am working with local artists, students and residents on a photo and text project inspired by my research on Robert Smithson’s on disappearing structures in particular Partially Buried Woodshed (1970).
Thank you for reviewing my images.
