About
Les Joynes (US)
b. Southern California, 1963. Lives and works in New York.
Les Joynes is a sculptor, multi-media and performance artist based in New York represented by Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York.
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. He was recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for India and served as a Senior Scholar in Art at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi.
As a contemporary artist, he resists the tendency that works of art become immediately commoditized (Fracsna 2015) and explores the formless and the abject through performance, installation sculpture and moving image. In the late 90’s Joynes and fellow Goldsmiths DIY artists resisting popular slick YBA trends often preferring to create artworks using ephemeral and impoverished materials. His work has been referred to as exuding “an abject but somehow jovial formlessness which is calculated to insult every formalist sensibility available… a kind of Ground Zero of sculptural iirresponsibility.” (ArtMonthly, London).
In 1997, Joynes established FormLAB an ongoing performance series that indexes the 18th century cabinets of curiosities that were precursors to the contemporary museum. Installed as art-making laboratories in museums in Brazil, France, Mongolia, South Korea, and recently China these works channel the Cadavre Exquis games popularized by French Surrealist André Breton. FormLAB’s outcomes include installation of elaborate assembly-line art making systems using defunct technologies (computers, old communications devices, typewriters, fragmented factory machines) in performances that explore a sense of shared consciousness (Foucault 1970 and Burroughs and Gyson 1978).
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 TrAIN, 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 with the 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 the philosopher of the Abject, Julia Kristeva.
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, 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 Japanese public arts sculptor Hideyuki Mogami while Monbusho Scholar (1997-2001) completing his masters in fine art in Japanese at Musashino Art University, Tokyo.
Doctoral Research 2008-2012
Researching 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.
Work
First exhibiting at eighteen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 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, Sydney, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Mongolia Zanabazar National Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaator, Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Sao Paulo, 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 and posing as a Docklands Light Railways worker 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).
Expanding Practice 2009 - present
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.
Extending his practice into painting he studied painting techniques under the artist James Rosenquist and uses painting as windows to tap the subconscious inspired by dreams of shape-shifting. Exhibited at Michael Steinberg Gallery in 2008, his diptych painting Golden State captures recollections of the grossly illuminated candy-colored technology emporiums spilling out into the streets in Shinjuku and Akihabara. He also draws inspiration from film, reassembling fragmented images recollected in dreams after watching Alain Resnais’ time-dysjunctive Last Year in Marienbad (1961) exhibited at Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York.
Joynes was invited by art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, as Visiting Scholar of modern and contemporary art history 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.
At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paolo, Brazil he created FormLAB Brazil, where within a central transparent studio module he would continuously tamper with and remake the works displayed in the exhibition as a means to destabilize the experience of the spectator and question when, if ever, a work of art is really finished.
His moving image works have exhibited at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, the Douba Film Festival, China and museums and galleries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Inspired by narratives of Chris Marker and Agnes Varda he is exploring new forms of filmmaking. He is also founder of KinoForm, which is exploring the creation of arte povera-inspired Low Wave moving image.
Also involved in artistic research he explores the tandem processes of experimental art-making and critical interpretation. As an editor of ProjectAnywhere - a journal on experimental art at University of Melbourne and Parsons School of Art he is supports art locate new spaces. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar in India, he examines how Indian contemporary art indexes Indian classical and folk art forms that have reflected facets of Indian identity.
_______________________________
Images above: FormLAB installation Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (2014) and below: FormLAB performance on the Great Wall in China (2017) as part of Fulbright US Public Diplomacy Award.
