Armory DigitalForum: Bruce Yonemoto
March 15 – April 13
Opening on ArtNight Pasadena, Friday, March 14, 6–10 p.m. Dusk – 11 p.m.
The Armory Center for the Arts and One Colorado present the West Coast Premier of Papa (the original potato eaters), a new video by internationally recognized Los Angeles-based artist Bruce Yonemoto. In addition, his recent video piece Sounds Like The Sound of Music will be screened. Papa (the original potato eaters) (runtime:11:14 min), a new media installation, depicts the modest life of a contemporary Peruvian peasant family, their relationship to the potato, and the stark contrast between the classic Van Gogh representations of rural poverty. Potatoes, indigenous to the farmlands of Andean Peru, serve as the principal metaphor in this revisionist documentary.

Screened with Papa, will be another recent South American video, Sounds Like The Sound of Music (runtime: 4:15 min.). This piece recreates the opening sequence from the film The Sound of Music, replacing the Austrian Alps with the Peruvian Andes, the village of Salzberg with Incan ruins, and Julie Andrews with a young Andean boy. His song is a translated version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous melody into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, spoken by 13 million people throughout the Andes and South America (as well as Jabba the Hutt in the Stars Wars films).

Bruce Yonemoto is Department Chair of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine, and has received numerous awards for his videos and installations. His work complicates expressions of post-Colonialism by incorporating many ingredients: escapist Hollywood cinema and inspirational Broadway musicals; youth culture and optimism; landscape and cultural artifacts; indigenous voices and melodic universality; Europe, Asia, and the Americas; Pre-War, Post-War and Cold War. The resulting mixture is equally complex: beauty and romance, memento and memorial, personal and political.