The Imaginary Line Around the Earth is an exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artist Bruce Yonemoto. The included installations and videos span the period between 1992 and 2017, drawing together a body of work created over 25 years of travel and research in South America. Much of Yonemoto’s practice examines the unreality of the media landscape, a landscape that distorts and manipulates our understanding of important and shared issues such as class and race — themes he has pursued since the 1970s, when he began collaborating with his brother, Norman Yonemoto, on video and installation work that deconstructed the visual language of Hollywood melodrama, soap opera, and television advertising to expose how mass media shapes cultural identity and memory.
The exhibition will also debut Yonemoto’s most recent project, The End of the World at the Edge of the Earth, shot in Argentina and produced with a grant from Creative Capital. Developed in collaboration with curator, critic, and historian Juli Carson, the project draws a poetic connection between two singular phenomena specific to Argentina: one of the last actively growing glaciers in the world, and the country’s enduring Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. In doing so, the work also engages the ideas of Argentine psychoanalytic theorist Oscar Masotta, whose experimental “anti-happenings” of the 1960s anticipate uncanny parallels with today’s media landscape of manufactured spectacle and misinformation.
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. His work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial, Los Angeles 1955–85 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, and the 2008 Gwangju Biennial, among many other institutions worldwide.
Bruce Yonemoto, Artist
Bruce Yonemoto is a visual artist and educator whose pioneering work in video, installation, and media art has critically examined the intersections of mass media, identity, and cultural memory. Born in San Jose, California, to parents who experienced the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, Yonemoto’s personal history deeply informs his artistic practice.
Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, the Sokei Art Institute in Tokyo, and Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Yonemoto has developed a body of work that interrogates the influence of Hollywood and popular culture on perceptions of race, sexuality, and desire.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including retrospectives at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern in London, and Anthology Film Archives in New York.
- Past Events:
Artist & Curator Walkthrough
Saturday, April 22, 2017
An artist walkthrough with Bruce Yonemoto and Juli Carson took place.
Screening and Book Launch
Sunday, July 28, 2017 at 5:00 PM
followed by a conversation between the artist and author Juli Carson.
A special screening of Bruce Yonemoto’s Sounds Like the Sound of Music (2005) and Papa (The Original Potato Eaters) (2006), plus the book launch of Bruce Yonemoto: Imaginary Line Around the Earth. The book was published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibition The Imaginary Line Around the Earth at Luckman Gallery which surveyed artwork inspired by his research in South America between 1992-2017.