Les Joynes

US. Born Southern California. Lives and Works in New York.

My my name is Les. I am a contemporary artist based in New York and founder of FormLAB, which has exhibited in museums and galleries in the Americas, Europe and Asia since 2009. Intermedial art (Higgins 1966) for me is a negotiation of current and historical spaces that intersect in global narratives. As an artist my work is involved with performance particularly inspired by the playful materialities of Dieter Roth, and the surrealist games of Andre Breton.
Originally trained in photography under the Disney cinematographer Wolfgang Lauter, I went on to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths in London where I studied under artists Michael Craig Martin and Gerard Hemsworth and later at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. I serve on the editorial board for ProjectAnywhere, a journal on site specific art in Australia and my work has featured in Sculpture Magazine, Art Monthly, Commons & Sense Tokyo, NHK Television, Flash Art, and the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR). Over the years I have been inspired by conversations with Ed Ruscha, Augusto de Campos, Andy Warhol, Lothar Baumgarten and James Rosenquist as well as scholars Rosalind Kraus, Alexander Alberro, John Rajchman, Jonathan Crary, Vidya Dehejia, and Okwui Enwezor who have helped shape the field of contemporary art history.
As artist Fellow at the Bauhaus in Dessau (2008-2009) I had the opportunity to explore Oskar Schlemmer’s inspirations for his Triadisches Ballett (1921) which led me to create a series of LED light performances with dancers in Singapore (2009) and later performances in Mongolia (2014) and China (2017) where I was recipient of the Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Awards. In 2022, I received the Fulbright Academic and Professional Excellence Award (2022) and posted as Fulbright Senior Scholar in Art and Performance at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi where I further explored performance, heritage and identity. In 2023, I was artist-in-residence in Kaohsiung Artist Village and Artist and Writer in Residence at the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature in Taipei.
When I am not creating, I also love to teach. I have served as Professor of Record for Modern and Contemporary Art History at Renmin University in Beijing and was Fulbright Visiting Associate Professor at Visva Bharati National University in India. I have presented on intercultural arts at Peking University, Kookmin University, University of the Arts London, National Taiwan Normal University, and Columbia University. Researching models for collaborative art practices, I completed my PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK and Post-Doctorate from the School of Communications and Arts (ECA), University of São Paulo, Brazil.