Denise Uyehara, Performance Artist/Playwright
| DATE: | Friday, September 28, 2007 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM |
| PLACE: | Berkeley Art Museum Theater, 2626 Bancroft Way |
| FORMAT: | Performance and Booksigning |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Japanese Studies, Consortium for the Arts, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Berkeley Art Museum |
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
Art Exhibitions: September 19-December 23, 2007
Light, like memory, tells a story. So can an artist create a performance from a string of light bulbs, a child’s rotating fish lamp and lump of clay? Performance artist Denise Uyehara says yes. Challenged by a beautifully minimalist theater at the Berkeley Art Museum, internationally presented Uyehara will perform new and recent works that harness the intangible qualities of light, memory and history. An artist whose work is hailed by Los Angeles Times as “mastery [that] amounts to a coup de theater,” Uyehara explores individual and collective memory through theater, movement, video projection and odd light sources.
Uyehara will share excerpts from Big Head, exploring the links between the Japanese American relocation, detention and internment during the WWII, and current state violence against Arab Americans, South Asians, and Muslims in the U.S. Previews from The Senkotsu (Mis)Translation Project respond to war and occupation in Okinawa, and her post-partum performance Yo Mama is still Queer-ish posits “When do babies begin voting Republican?” This evening also celebrates the publication of Uyehara’s new book Maps of City & Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara (Kaya Press), a collection that brings together her performance work of the last 15 years. Book signing follows.
A pioneering performance artist, playwright and writer Uyehara was one of the first to explore Asian American queer subjectivity through performance. Her work has appeared at REDCAT at Disney Hall, the Walker Art Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space, and internationally at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and in Tokyo, Vancouver, and Hairou, China. Her performances take on issues of body, memory and identity, bringing together narrative, movement, clay animation and other visual elements, while challenging pre-conceived notions of identity, and catalogues what marks the body in migrations across borders. The Los Angeles-based artist is also a founding member of the culturally diverse experimental collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. Her ongoing workshops including the Rad Asian Sisters explore notions of shares space and community formation through a focus on form and aesthetics. She is a recent recipient of the mid-career City Of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowship and a frequent lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.
