Dia Center for the Arts and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) will celebrate the early film and video work of Joan Jonas with a screening at Dia on September 28, 2000. Highlights of the evening will include the first screening in fifteen years of Jonas' 1976 film Mirage, which will be projected simultaneously with one of her videos, and the premiere of the newly-rediscovered color video of her 1973 performance Glass Puzzle.

The program will also include Jonas' 16mm films Wind (a film, recently restored and transferred to video, recording the artist's 1968 performance), Veil (a 1971 collaboration with Richard Serra), and Songdelay (a 1973 film, newly available on video, which includes Gordon Matta-Clark among its cast). In these early films, Jonas uses the medium - often black and white and silent - to examine the human body, its ritualistic movements, and the spaces it occupies.

This celebration of Jonas' pioneering work will take place on Dia's rooftop at 548 West 22nd Street in New York City on Thursday, September 28, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Acclaimed multi-media and performance artist Joan Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. Key early works examine space and perceptual phenomena, merging elements of dance, Japanese Noh and Kabuki-theater, drawing, and sculpture. In these solo performances, Jonas developed an emblematic vocabulary synthesizing ritualized gestures and symbolic objects, including masks, costumes, and mirrors. Jonas began using video in performance in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), incorporating live cameras and monitors as a means of transforming and layering images, space and time. Her performance-based videos include the influential 1972 Vertical Roll, in which she explores female identity while employing an interrupted electronic signal - or "vertical roll" - as a formal device that dislocates space and fractures the recorded image. Jonas' films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, including those to be screened at Dia, extend her enigmatic language of gesture, drawing, and objects. Jonas' recent work - installations, performance, and photographs - continues her signature inquiry into theatricality and ritual. Jonas received the 3rd Annual Polaroid Video Art Award in 1987 and the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award in 1988. She lives and works in New York City.

Dia Center for the Arts is a tax-exempt charitable organization. Established in 1974, the organization has become one of the largest in the United States dedicated to contemporary art and culture. In fulfilling this commitment, Dia sustains diverse programming in visual arts, poetry, education, and critical discourse and debate. Exhibition hours during the 2000-2001 season are Wednesday - Sunday, 12 noon to 6 pm, beginning September 13, 2000. Admission is $6 ($3 for students and seniors and free to members).

Electronic Arts Intermix is a nonprofit media arts organization that is one of the world's leading resources for artists' video and new media. Founded in 1971, EAI serves artists, educators, curators, and diverse audiences through a wide range of programs, including the distribution of an international collection of artists' tapes, ranging from historical works of the 1960s to new works by emerging media artists of the 1990s.