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"As a way of tracking historicity I am exploring abandoned towns, industrial sites, military installations, temples and burial sites as well as places that evoke the formless including underground caverns and caves. Perhaps these are places where I can explore and at the same time discover my own myth.
I seek out forgotten places: abandoned cement-covered 1950s atomic-shelters, underground catacombes, san-buried tombs in Southern Egypt, flora-covered disused 1980s fun-parks in Asia and almost forgotten thousand-year old stories in Northern Scandinavia.
All of this is a picture of human inertia pushing forward and then suddenly releasing its grip on buildings and land releasing entropy, where nature’s inertia comes in to fill the vacuum. I'm interested in the wasy of seeing many objects in the same space at once and assembling images in a way that explores entropy and excavation (which derives from the word excavare -to make hollow.). A sort of digging, revealing what is on the inside of mountains (caves), and what is below the ground (artifacts, detritus, rubbish, bones, Campbell Soup cans, burned potlatch...)". (9.11.08)
Bio: Joynes' work offers glimpses of forms that hover on the verge of definition and is reminiscent of an archaeological excavation where almost-recognized objects are subsumed in multiple strata. His research often takes him to abandoned towns, condemned factories, decommissioned military installations and other sites which echo human activity.
Born in Santa Barbara, California he possesses a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Fine Art from Central St. Martins College of Art, London; Master of Arts Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University London; and he is recipient of a Monbusho Scholarship in Japan at Musashino Art University, Tokyo.
His work has been included at Sandra Bürgel Gallery, Berlin; Nylon, London; Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo; The Art Center/Art and Culture Foundation, Seoul; Romo Gallery, Atlanta; Barbican Concourse Gallery; London; BEFF-Bangkok; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and Maejima Art Center/AIT Tactical Museum, Japan. Most recently he has exhibited at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York in Les Joynes: Middleworlds (2008) and Parallel Universes (2008) at Aamotgaard, Norway. He has recently completed a Fellowship and residency at the Nordisk Kunstnarsenter-Dalsasen, Norway. He is currently a Bauhaus Fellow at the Bauhaus Stiftung, Dessau, Germany
Image: Detail from series "From the frontiers of deconstructed power" (bunker in Eastern Germany), 2003