Tracing Wind and Memory: Joan Jonas’s Empty Rooms
There are dark parts in the room of memory, and there are illuminated ones. The lighting is uneven; most of the space remains in shadow. What glows comes from the works themselves—light projected or filtered through the semi-translucent paper sculptures. The paper is white, with loose edges and creases that seem either windblown or hand-crumpled. As visitors move through, they set the surfaces into a faint tremble.
The space itself is still, but perception is not. The gaze shifts between sculpture and projection, first drawn to the suspended forms, then guided by sound, weaving back and forth through the gaps where image and object overlap. The piano score carries a clear melody that persistently veers off course before settling into structure—delayed, fractured, dissipating. Like trying to catch wind with one’s palm, it alters the flow of air in small but definite ways.
Joan Jonas, a pioneer of performance and video art, has long used the body as a point of contact, interweaving moving image, sound, object, and language into a non-narrative structure of perception. Her work does not aim to tell stories, but rather to place, repeat, and dislocate images, gestures, and sounds in space—forming a rhythm of sensation that remains unresolved and continually folding. What she cares about is not the event itself, but how perception takes place—how memory is triggered, folded, and erased in the act of seeing. As she once wrote: “I didn’t see a difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw again, erase again—memory is erased.”
Her exhibition Empty Rooms, on view at Gladstone Gallery from March 1 to April 12, 2025, brings together sculpture, drawing, and video. Some elements revisit images and objects from her 2015 U.S. Pavilion installation They Come to Us without a Word at the Venice Biennale; others are newly created, allowing the exhibition to unfold through recurrence and renewal.
The music, composed by her longtime collaborator Jason Moran, extends the visual structure into another register—its broken and suspended rhythms echoing both the movement of wind and the temporality of memory. Always diverging before coherence, dissolving before arrival, the sound leaves a faint trace in its wake.
At the center of the gallery, twelve paper sculptures hang from the ceiling at varying heights, forming the exhibition’s structural core. Each consists of a metal frame wrapped in Japanese washi paper, with light tubes threaded along the frame and powered through thin wires descending from above. The surfaces are marked with natural folds and irregular tension—traces of physical pressure and temporal wear. Due to the paper’s translucency and the open, non-enclosed forms, the internal metal structures remain clearly visible. Viewers can see through the layers and gaps into the interiors of each work.
These sculptures resemble discrete spatial units—like individual rooms—suspended in loose proximity. They form a non-linear, non-hierarchical field. There is no prescribed path; instead, viewers move freely among them, drawing near, stepping back, circling around. Rather than composing a maze-like architecture, the works appear as a constellation of floating, rhythmic nodes.
Their scale is modest, their presence light and unassuming. As viewers approach, they instinctively soften their pace, drawn to the creases and curves on the paper’s surface. The works’ “openness” comes not only from their form but also from their responsiveness to the act of viewing. Rather than directing attention, they host light, air, time, and the viewer’s own movements—making perception itself part of the work. It is within this minimal construction that the sculptures establish a highly sensitive perceptual system: one centered on sensation, guided by rhythm.
In these suspended sculptures, Joan Jonas constructs a rhythm of perception using the barest materials. Eschewing narrative and symbolism, the works generate spatial relationships that unfold through the viewer’s movement—a distilled continuation of her long-standing inquiry into how seeing happens. Compared to her early mirror-based performances, where reflection fractured visual continuity, Empty Rooms offers a subtler sensory mode. The sculptures absorb and diffuse light, emphasizing permeability over rupture. Rather than reflecting the viewer’s image, they structure space through rhythm—inviting proximity and pause. This shift from confrontation to invitation is not a softening, but a deepening: a fractured perceptual shock has become a suspended, breathing experience.
On one side of the gallery, a wall-sized grid of drawings unfolds as a counterpoint to the sculptures—extending the exhibition’s inquiry into wind, movement, and trace. Composed of quick, broken blue lines, each drawing outlines a tree not as a static image, but as the residue of motion. While wind enters the sculptures as a real, kinetic force—trembling the paper’s surface—it appears in the drawings as a gestural imprint: not motion itself, but the trace it leaves behind. This emphasis on gesture and residual mark-making reflects Jonas’s broader practice, and is clearly evident in her 2024 retrospective Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, where drawing served as a record of experience and a means of bringing the natural world into performance. Across both mediums, wind is less a literal element than a structural principle—shaping rhythm and presence across different materials.
But it is the lighting that most strongly intervenes in perception. A sidelight exaggerates the natural wrinkles in the paper, making these structural textures more prominent than the images themselves. While the drawings use the same washi paper as the sculptures—preserving a unified material language—the paper here is no longer light. It is thickened by light and shadow. Unfortunately, the overall illumination is too dim, and the emphasis on texture too forceful—diminishing both the readability and generative potential of the images.
At the far end of the gallery, a projected video forms the visual focal point of the space. The scene overlays the silhouettes of two young women—one dragging objects in the foreground, the other appearing behind windmills spinning in the background. The movements are slow, and the imagery unfolds in overlapping fragments. Their identities are unclear, but their gestures evoke a sense of vague familiarity. The combination of their anonymous figures and the constant rotation of the windmills produces a striking sensation: this is not a representation of an image, but a fragment of memory. The windmills render the idea of “wind” into a direct visual motif, while the girls’ indistinct forms remain visible yet ungraspable. This juxtaposition of precision and ambiguity gives the video a dreamlike intensity.
While the video initially appears as a single screen-based image, its presence is structural—spanning an entire wall and enveloping the space like a perceptual frame. The sculptures, while positioned in the foreground, feel like fragments suspended within a broader temporal flow. One does not watch the video as an isolated object; rather, it sustains the other elements—holding them within its ambient duration. Compared to the tactile specificity of the paper sculptures, the video remains abstract, distanced, and fluid—less an image to be viewed than a medium that conditions the act of viewing itself.
I eventually found myself watching from behind the projection—looking through the suspended paper sculptures. This angle was not prescribed by the work, but it felt intuitively right. From this position, the lightness of the paper, the flickering of the video, and the movement of sound created a layered space. Viewing was no longer directed at a screen; instead, it became immersive. The video ceased to be an “object to be seen” and became part of a structure of viewing—one in which the viewer moves, is enveloped, and passively receives light from an uncertain position.
Sound enters this final segment as the exhibition’s only audible element, composed by Jason Moran specifically for the installation. Neither ambient nor illustrative, it operates structurally—expanding the visual field into a temporal dimension. Rather than guiding attention, the music disperses it, unsettling the viewer’s orientation while deepening their spatial awareness. Its presence is subtle yet formative: a rhythmic undercurrent that binds image, movement, and memory. Here, sound is not simply heard—it mediates perception, absorbs duration, and sustains the exhibition’s shift from stillness to flow.
Yining Fang, 2025