Mike Kelley in "Kappa," 1986.

Mike Kelley in "Kappa," 1986.

Bruce Yonemoto @ White Flags Projects, 2010


"Dressing Asian bodies in uniforms from Western Costume is a perfect example of the playfulness that characterizes Yonemoto's work. It also raises serious questions about our reliance on simplified conceptual categories in everyday life."

- J.M Miller, Art Papers

 

White Flag Projects is pleased to announce a screening of three videos by pioneering media artist, Bruce Yonemoto who is currently a visiting professor/artist at Washington University.  These videos were curated by Professor Robert Gero during Professor Yonemoto's 2010 Freund Fellowship residency at Washington University in St. Louis.  Yonemoto himself will present and speak on his work.  Robert Gero will give a curator's introductory talk at the screening.  The event is free and open to the public, doors open at 7p, and the screening begins at 8p.

During his 20-year collaboration with his brother, Norman, Bruce Yonemoto has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. 

Three films are included in this screening:

Kappa, 1986
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto in collaboration with Mike Kelley.
The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully "degraded" forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts.

Vault, 1984
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art.

Garage Sale II, 1980
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Continues Yonemoto’s search for something good to watch on TV, but finds that fetishes may get in the way of programming. Focusing on a sexually dysfunctional punk couple played by artists Tony Oursler and Wendon Baldwin.