Joan Jonas’s drawing practice has been a core through line in her work, connecting her multidimensional and disciplinary practice that spans performance, sculpture, film, and dance over the last fifty years. For her first exhibition with the Gallery, Jonas presents a selection of significant drawings that reference animals, history and her own body.

Inspired by the intersection between fantasy and reality, Jonas explores myths, fairy tales, and the natural world in the works on view. The exhibition features a major installation of the series, ‘I know why they left’ (2017), created while Jonas was an Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2017. The artist photographed and documented an assortment of real and mythological creatures found throughout the museum, conservation labs, and archives. Redrawing and tracing from these photographs, Jonas paid particular attention to both birds and fish – animals in movement, studying their various states of swimming, gliding, and flying.