LMAN gallery is pleased to announce the opening of It's About Time..., an exhibition of new work by eminent West Coast multi-media artist Norman Yonemoto. The artist has crafted a series of Wall Clocks, ten multimedia collages each mounted in Joseph Cornell-inspired shadow boxes.
Every box contains a miniature video installation that displaces the idea of time, moving its mechanical image from the real clock to its reflection on a video screen.
In each box Norman Yonemoto discloses a different state of mind, mixing found objects and personal artifacts with elegance and humor. A pair of dice hanging on a rearview mirror, spirals of shells and planets' orbits, the Goddess age ringing our doorbell, the spines of racism growing on a spiral of DNA made of barbed wire and decorated as a Christmas tree, fill the boxed in time along with striking fragments of the artist's life. Wall clocks' technology is very simple: a combination of mirrors, small LCD flat screens, small video cameras, lights and real clocks hidden from direct sight. The boxes are more than containers: accurately crafted, they give colors and shape to imaginary theaters of human experience.
In our customized present we seem to hold Time in our hands and shape it according to our personal needs. This is an illusion. "Are we about to reach a utopian end?" he asks. "No history, no future, only the now; the eternal goal of transcendence. Perhaps we are nearing the end of our cosmological search for meaning through matter, time and desire."
Titles of the 10 wall clocks
Out of Chaos (2002), Probable Cause (2002), Disco Muybridge (2003), Movie Palace of the Mind (2003), My Pump (2003), Christmas Greetings From Tule Lake ca 1944 (2004), Transparency (2003), Out of Chaos #2 (2004), Hallowed to be Her Name (2004), Commodity (2004).
Norman Yonemoto grew up in Post WW II California. For his parents the traumatic interment camp experience (and their roots in political mass hysteria and mass media propaganda immediately after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor) burned fresh in their memories. They raised Norman to question political institutions and the mechanics of the mass-media. These questions were to form the foundation of his art: the films, videos and installations produced over the last thirty-five years.
After finishing his film studies at American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1973, Norman and his brother Bruce, then a fine arts student, pooled their talents to explore the material and contextual implications of the moving images spread by the mass media. They became known the world over as "the Yonemoto brothers", authors of films, single channels videos, performances and installations. Their collaboration ended in 1999 after the first complete survey of their work opened the new Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Norman Yonemoto has received numerous prestigious grants and awards. Among them: Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, the Rocky Mountain Institute of Film and Video Production, and the Rockefeller Foundation. And he has been the recipient of the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists, the Gold Plaque Award from the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Best New Narrative Award at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival.
During the last two decades his work has been invited and featured by prominent institutions, media art festivals and contemporary art biennials. They include: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 1990; Museum of Modern Art, New York 1991; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the American Center, Paris and New York 1992; Galérie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris 1992; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruch (Germany) 1992; Whitney Biennal, New York 1993; Phoenix Triennial, Pheonix (Arizona) 1993; Opening Exhibition of the American Center in Paris, Paris (France) 1994; Dentro Brasil, The Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach (CA) 1995; 6th International Triennial Umetnostina Gallerija Maribor, Maribor, (Slovenia) 2000; Interactive Friction, USC Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles (CA) with Bruce Yonemoto; Kwangiu Biennial (Korea) 2000; Asian American Film Festival, San Francisco (CA) 2001; Made in California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (CA) 2001; COLA individual Artist Fellowship Show, Los Angeles Municipal Art gallery, Los Angeles (CA) 2003; War: Protest in America 1965-2004, Redcat, Los Angeles (CA) 2004.
Norman Yonemoto's ongoing research into the effect of technology on our concepts of "self" and the "Other" parallels his personal struggle to keep his own mind and body intact after a stroke left him partially paralyzed.
At present he has a hockey puck size device implanted in his abdomen that pumps pain medication directly to his spine, and a pace maker-like device implanted on his brain to control his tremors. "It's a modification to my software" says the artist. He smiles and adds "It's my wetware upgraded."
When it comes to our technological environment, there is no longer an inside or outside of Norman's body. Doctors communicate with the devices using a laptop and a mouse. When the pump runs low on medication, it beeps a warning. It's a little like having R-2 D-2 at your side, says Yonemoto. Every five years when the battery is low, the pump must be surgically replaced. The shadow box entitled "My Pump", uses a pump that was in his body for 5 years as a piece of its collage.
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