Les Joynes (US)
CEC Artslink Projects
Les Joynes (CEC Ulaanbaatar 2014, St. Petersburg 2017)
Dr. Les Joynes is a ZERO1 Art and Technology artist artist based in New York. Recipient of the 2014 CEC Artslink Grant, Les produced FormLAB Mongolia, a museum exhibition featuring work created in Tsaatan reindeer-herding communities and US-Mongolian artistic collaborations at Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaatar. (image above - performances in August, 2014).
Video still from Shapeshifter. 2014 © FormLAB and ARS, New York and DACS, London. CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award.
Les first visited St. Petersburg in the 1970s and returned as a 2017 CEC ArtsLink artist producing the series "где Ленин?" (Where is Lenin?) documenting Memory and Monuments and their Absence. While in St. Petersburg, Les presented Bard Smolny’s Curatorial Program at Leningrad State University and the Pro Arte Foundation.
Following his CEC grant Les returned to Mongolia for US Department of State sponsored research on the arts and education and he chaired the Young Researchers Conference. His CEC Artslink work has exhibited at the Pulse Art Fair New York, The Cultivist, New York and Douba Film Festival, Sichuan, China. He continues his research on site specific art as 2022 recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for India.
Image from “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
A native of Southern California Les completed his graduate studies at Goldsmiths, London, his PhD in the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK and post-doctorate at the School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo, Brazil. He was Erasmus Scholar at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts and Japan Ministry of Culture Scholar at Musashino Art University in Tokyo.
A scholar on contemporary visual cultures and art histories at Columbia University Les served on the Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” curatorial team as well as exhibitions in the UK and Japan. He serves as an editor 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.
Other projects
Still from Buryiat (2014). CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award. 2014 © FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London