Bruce and Norman Yonemoto at the Japanese American National Museum - Japanese American National Museum, New York, New York - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Leah Ollman

This exhibition inaugurated the expansion of the Japanese American National Museum, a Gyo Obata-designed pavilion in the historic Little Tokyo district. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto were a fitting choice for the museum's opening show. The brothers, who have made films, videos, installations and sculpture together since the '70s, explore the charged, troubled region where unlike cultures meet. This confrontational zone, evoked again and again in their poignant work, hosts similarly vexed collisions between illusion and reality, stereotype and truth, memory and experience.

The Yonemotos, who were raised in northern California and now live in Los Angeles, draw from an assemblage tradition, shifting and intensifying the emotional load of found objects through their recontextualization. For raw material, they cull family photographs and other common objects, but primarily--and most incisively--the film and television footage that constituted the visual landscape of their postwar youth.

In A Matter of Memory (1995), a plain glass of water doubles as a metaphoric wishing well. Projected from below onto the bottom of the ordinary-sized glass are TV commercials from the '50s and photographs of the artists as young boys, all superimposed over the image of a dissolving sugar cube (also part of the projection). While not all of the work here achieved such compact synergy, the strongest work was similarly film-driven, and relied on disjunctions that spell themselves out over time with mounting insistence and irony.

For Land of Projection (1992), the Yonemotos planted a huge fiberglass replica of an Easter Island monolith in the middle of a darkened room, then projected upon it a crass, changing "skin" of television sports shows, soaps and commercials. Listening stations around the room played accounts of Easter Island as seen by foreigners, from early ethnographic studies to contemporary tourist brochures. The readings and sculpture potently illustrate a classic, tragic model of imperialist desire, in which a native culture functions as no more than a prop upon which to heap exoticist illusions and stage consumerist plots.

The most recent work in the show was the haunting Silicon Valley, a video installation commissioned for the museum's original site, a former Buddhist temple and meeting/movie hall adjacent to the new pavilion. From among the lanternlike chandeliers, the Yonemotos hung a screen that extended onto the floor like a scroll unfurled. The nine-minute video montage projected onto it reads as an ode to lost, unrecoverable innocence. It begins with clouds, which give way to cherry blossoms, which in turn are blown aside by wind to reveal electronic circuitry. After the sound of a modern connection and a countdown, the screen fills with the hellish red of an atomic bomb blast. The smoke clears to reveal a final image of tense tranquility, a view of identical, cookie-cutter homes in a contemporary subdivision. The pastoral simplicity of the Yonemotos' childhood, as evoked in the video's beginning, may have been only a media-inflected myth, but it's one that induces an inescapable nostalgia when compared to the current American condition, visualized at the video's end as unchecked technological power and soulless conformity.