Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Bruce Yonemoto and Norman Yonemoto are two Los Angeles, California-based video/installation artists of Japanese American heritage.

Family background and birth

Main article: Bruce Yonemoto

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's family was among the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. Their mother, Fumiko Rosie Hitomi, was placed with her family at Tule Lake in Northern California. Their father, Tak Yomemoto, had been drafted into the United States Army. When Rosie's uncle was brutally murdered in camp, Tak sent condolences and rekindled their relationship. Soon after, they were given permission to marry and leave the camp. Rosie was then allowed to relocate to Chicago, where Norman was born in 1946. Once the war ended and Japanese Americans were released, the family relocated to Northern California where their father worked as a carnation grower and plant pathogist.[1] Bruce was born in 1949 in San Jose. They have two other brothers, Gerald and Roger.[2]

Education

Growing up in the 1950s in Santa Clara, California the two brothers were actively a part of the post-war idealism and the culture of movies and television shows.[3] 8 mm home movies, projection screens, and television sets became a part of everyday life.[4] Perhaps even more importantly, their mother went against the cultural grain of the time and talked to her sons about the Japanese American incarceration experience.[5]

Norman Yonemoto's training was in film. After Santa Clara University, University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, he attended the American Film Institute for two years where he earned his MFA in 1972. Bruce Yonemoto, however, sought his training in the visual arts. After UC Berkeley, he went to Tokyo studying at the Sokei Bijitsu Gakkō. Once he returned to California, he obtained his Masters in Fine Art at Otis Art Institute. He is currently the chair and professor of the Art Department at the University of California, Irvine.

Work

Both brothers utilize Los Angeles as tool and backdrop for a number of projects, drawing particularly from the Hollywood veneer of glamour and romance. From 1976 through the 1990s, the brothers collaborated on numerous films, single-channel videos and video installations. Their first collaboration, Garage Sale (1976), was a 16 mm feature film about a young blond man named Hero and his wife drag queen Goldie Glitters. As Goldie demands a divorce, Hero, in a frenzy to retain her love, encounters numerous characters – each with their own idiosyncrasies and their own definitions for success. The actress who plays Goldie was drag-queen Goldie Glitters,[6] Santa Monica City College's 1975 Homecoming Queen. Though it is made obvious to the audience that Goldie is actually a man, the line between reality and fiction is blurred when Goldie is sympathetically portrayed as a woman tapping into recognizable fantasies imbued into contemporary culture through fictional Hollywood romances and unrealistic dreams.[7]

Similar themes, clashing idea, and the juxtaposition and confusion of reality with fiction echo through their subsequent projects which assemble raw materials from their post-WWII youth and home videos with recognizable Hollywood and industry-inspired scenes, dialogues, and romances.[8] Their projects confront the collision of cultures, ethnicities, and sexuality by alluding to and referencing the Japanese American incarceration, their Japanese heritage, Norman's gay sexuality, their postwar 'Americanization,' Hollywood, and commercialism. Some of their projects include: Based on Romance (1979); An Impotent Metaphor (1979), Green Card: An American Romance (1982); Vault (1984); Kappa (1986) and Made In Hollywood (1990), videos that explore the space between the romantic fantasies of Hollywood and the reality of human psycho-sexual relationships. Their recent works include a 1993 collaboration with John Baldessari for the Santa Monica Museum of Art entitled Three Locations/Three Points of View, A Matter of Memory (1995) and Silicon Valley (1999). As a contributor to the field of film and video, the Yonemoto brothers often utilized the language and imagery of film to expose and subvert the powers of racist propaganda, of film.[9] A Matter of Memory considers the act of memory and the reconstruction of lost or faded memory.[10]

The latter collaborations have almost all been commissioned by museums and utilize specific gallery spaces to affect the viewer experience, often collaborating color, still and moving images, sound, and movement to challenge the viewer.

Recognition

The Yonemoto brothers have received numerous awards including the 1993 Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and video; the Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, the American Film Institute for Independent Film and Videomaker Grant, and Best New Narrative at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival.

Their work is in numerous permanent museum collections: among them, the Museum of Modern Art[2] and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Japanese American National Museum and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Their work is in private collections including that of Peter and Eileen Norton.[1]

Norman's death

Norman died in his home in Venice on February 28, 2014 after a series of strokes over a period of time.[2]

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 http://www.janm.org/exhibits/yonemoto/installation.html
  2. 1 2 3 http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/03/local/la-me-norman-yonemoto-20140304
  3. ↑ http://www.janm.org/exhibits/yonemoto/intro.html
  4. ↑ Higa, Karin et al., Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance, p. 16.
  5. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6ywGhT9SFE&list=PLE4C2713B1F34BDE4
  6. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158630/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_11
  7. ↑ Higa, Karin et al., Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance, p. 18.
  8. ↑ Hallmark, Kara Kelley, p. 252-53.
  9. ↑ Higa, Karin, "Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese American Artists." (Artist's Pages.) Art Journal 55 (Fall 1996): 7.
  10. ↑ Chattopadhyay, Collette, Afterimage, p. 45.
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