BRUCE AND NORMAN YONEMOTO: MEMORY, MATTER AND MODERN ROMANCE

Dates

January 23–July 4, 1999

Location

Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles

Curator

Karin Higa

Description

This mid-career survey examines the single-channel video and video installations by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Los Angeles-based brothers who have worked together since 1976. The exhibition features the Yonemotos’ work from the last 25 years, providing a comprehensive analysis of their art in all media. Works explore issues of representation, the fabrication of memory, and the construction of self and group identity. The narrative language of Hollywood and the importance of cinematic images in creating concepts of race, ethniciW and desire serve as the critical backdrop. The exhibition includes the unveiling of a site-specific installation, Silicon Valley (1999), commissioned by the Museum.

Features

Among the works to be exhibited are the Yonemotos’ recent video installations, including Framed (1989), a complex installation that layers archival film footage of the Japanese American internment from with slide projections and mirrored scrims, and Environmental (1993), which combines home movie screens and projected TV commercial and movies from the 1950s that are remnants of WWII and the lingering antagonism toward the Asian “yellow menace.” Single-channel videos to be featured include Made in Hollywood (1990), featuring Patricia Arquette and Ron Vawter; Green Card: An American Romance (1982); and Japan in Paris in L.A. (1997), which is loosely based on the life of the late Japanese modernist painter Saeki Yuzo and his encounter with Parisian painter Maurice Vlaminck.

Catalogue

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and will include essays by curator Karin Higa, critic Timothy Martin, and author and New Yorker contributor lan Buruma

Support

Co-organized by the Fellows of Contemporary Art with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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