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Bruce Yonemoto's self-reflexive, multimedia works of art in the deftly
titled exhibition Screen Gems (a reference to the 1950s movie
magazine with the same title) investigate how race, ethnicity, identity,
time, and meaning are constituted through the apparatus of film, Hollywood,
and the media. Born 1949 and reared in the Santa Clara valley, CA, Bruce
Yonemoto has seen that farmland valley's extirpation and regeneration
as Silicon Valley, the center of computer technology and dot.com startups
(and their break down) in America. Like most of his baby-boom generation,
his childhood was mediated by television, Hollywood movies, magazines,
and comic books. Mass media has profoundly shaped Bruce Yonemoto's life,
casting long shadows on his comprehension of American popular culture
and his place in that broadly defined and changing ideology. He excavates
his Sansei (third-generation) Japanese American genealogy and considers
how post-World War II American media defined Japanese identity and produced
it as the suspect other. Working with screens, monitors, imagery, objects,
footage, and ideas from video, film, television, and popular culture,
Yonemoto examines personal, cultural, and social memory and their roles
in the construction of identity.
Yonemoto's cinematic and filmic installations make overt references to
particular films, such as his conceptual nod to the early 1960s film of
H. G. Wells's novel The Time Machine. Yet they also suggest a
larger and more complicated context than simply the visual pleasure, distraction,
and conundrum of film. In many of the works in this exhibition, Yonemoto
examines the manipulation of time, metaphorically, physically, and cinematically.
He refers to specific films, narrowing his-and our-perspective, and then
pans out to include a broader view. Our experience of time, mediated by
the media and by our physical and emotional place in the world shapes
Yonemoto's work. The Claymation flowers in the Time Machine series
demonstrate how time and experience are manipulated through film, projection,
viewing, and ways of seeing. Yonemoto also critically investigates the
construction of Japanese American identity and how it has been manipulated,
mediated, redrawn, and handed back to him; packaged through film, the
media and its distortions. In Environmental (1993), a work he
completed in collaboration with his brother Norman, he borrowed Warner
Bros. special-effects footage used in World War II movies about the Pacific.
According to Yonemoto they are "movies which did not have to apologize
for their propagandistic and openly racist attitudes" (unpublished
artist's statement, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, n.d.). These images are
projected against a background of different home movie screens that overlap
one another to create a stuttered, fragmented visage. Opposite these screens,
a small television monitor plays a montage of 1950s television commercials
that aired during Yonemoto's childhood. The commercial images of a giddy,
postwar consumer America are thrown into relief against the anti-Japanese
propaganda. Americans of all backgrounds were expected to swallow both
sets of imagery without question.
In The Wedding, Yonemoto projects images across a reconstructed
byobu screen, a folding Japanese screen often used in ritual ceremonies.
Here, the byobu is reconfigured as an apparatus for optical and conceptual
perception, as images of clouds and a traditional Japanese wedding are
projected onto its accordion-folded surface. Yonemoto employs both time-lapse
photography and extreme slow motion in this installation to reveal that
which is normally invisible to our perception. The time-lapse photography
speeds up the cloud film, making the clouds' slow and luxurious movement
easily visible. And in the wedding scene, the slow motion makes visible
gestures and movements that normally pass by too quickly to be seen. The
images of clouds may suggest infinity but the wedding scene may suggest
the boundaries not only of marriage, but also the constraints, burdens,
and pressures of ritual-bound cultures. Ritual represents cultural continuity
but also can thwart change and growth. While some of our warmest childhood
memories may be based on repeated rituals, we may also be burdened by
the pressure to sustain ritual. Yonemoto's The Wedding may invoke
both the pleasure and anxiety of orchestrating and complying with cultural
expectations.
Bruce Yonemoto's work in Bruce Yonemoto: Screen Gems adroitly
calls into question the often unquestioned images that the media presents
to us. As filmmaker and object maker, Yonemoto exerts control over our
spectatorship, which elongates into control over imagery, especially notable
in the often anti-humanistic imagery produced by Hollywood and the media.
Yonemoto examines the ideas of time, memory, and how they can be constructed
filmically, if only for a moment in their natural fluidity. By combining
the historical memory of Environmental with the fleeting memory
of time in the Time Machine series and other works, Bruce Yonemoto's
self-reflexive works suggest that memory is an apparatus of history's
ongoing, open-ended production.
Dana Self
Curator
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