Overview

Mirage was designed specifically for the screening room of Anthology Film Archives in New York's SoHo neighborhood, where Joan Jonas first performed the piece on several nights over a few weeks in 1976, for an audience of her friends: local artists, musicians, and dancers. In the first performances, Jonas projected images of herself drawing and erasing her marks on a chalkboard—some appropriated from her past works—as well as a five-minute documentary loop of volcanoes erupting and a film of a television turned on its side. She also stepped through a small wooden hoop and completed other live actions. Mirage was the last of a series of black and white video performances completed by Jonas; she would subsequently adopt color technologies. In 2001, Jonas made a new version of Mirage, consisting of a silent, approximately thirty-minute loop which, in the artist’s words, “is a combination of old performances, more chalk drawings and footage shot off the television at that time.”