Final Gallery Talks for Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s “Memory, Matter and Modern Romance” at Japanese American National Museum—Acclaimed Art Exhibition Closes July 11

Los Angeles—After a critically acclaimed stay at the Japanese American National Museum as one of the inaugural exhibitions of the new Pavilion in January 1999, the mid-career survey exhibition Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance closes July 11. The final gallery talks for Memory, Matter and Modern Romance, led by assistant curator Kristine Kim and curatorial intern Stacey Uradomo, are scheduled to be held June 26, July 3 and July 10 at 2:00 p.m. Having been called “the most important American artists of Japanese acnestry working in Los Angeles” by the LA Times’ art critic Christopher Knight, this exhibition expores the Los Angeles-based brothers’ 23-year career, featuring their video, video installation, and objects presenting the components of mass media in poignant, ironic and often humorous ways.

Sunday, July 11 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. is the last chance to view Memory, Matter and Modern Romance, which features the installation Silicon Valley (1999), the Yonemotos’ most recent effort after producing a body of distinguished collaborative art since 1976. Silicon Valley is located in the Hirasaki Theater Gallery of the Historic Building and consists of two video projections and a monumental custom-made movie screen that sits verically and horizontally. It was commissioned by the Japanese American National Museum for the opening of the new Pavilion, and the result is a grand tale of destruction and emergence, memory and reality revolving around the fate of the Santa Clara Valley, where the Yonemotos grew up.

Silicon Valley features images of clouds, falling cherry blossoms, a clip from the infamous 1964 “Daisy Girl” commercial from the Johnson-Goldwater Presidential race, two atomic bomb blasts, an archaic computer, and finally a stale suburban landscape known today as “Silicon Valley.” Perhaps their most personal work ever, Silicon Valley points a skeptical glance at technology, linking the atomic bomb explosions (sounds of which reverberate throughout the Historic Building) with the emergence of the computer industry and the destructive land development brought upon the rural farmland once called “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight.”

Karin Higa, director of curatorial and exhibitions at the Japanese American National Museum and curator of the Yonemoto exhibition, believes that their art demonstrates a prescient interest in narrative, melodrama, and the arrestment of race and ethnicity. Higa says, “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto provacatively use the language of Hollywood and the mass media to explore our culture’s fascination and reliance on mediated imagery.”

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance is on view in three exhibition galleries and one video viewing-room at the Japanese American National Museum. The exhibition has been initiated and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, and has received support from the AT+T Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council and the Japanese American National Museum

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