7 episodes, 7:00 minutes per episodes (49:00 minutes total)
The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA. Addressing representations of queer existence, love, and cosmic connections, The Wooden People merges Mayan myths with the drama of a telenova. The film elaborates on the Mayan origin story of “the Wooden People”, a caste of pre-humans that were ultimately eradicated. The Wooden People are another fallen folk and exemplify an alternative attempt at what it looks like, and means, to be human. In Bustamante’s work the Wooden People are presented as a subcultural group, living in contemporary Los Angeles. Their story includes familiar social structures, such as caste systems, which have existed throughout history and persist today. By contextualizing this group of ancient people in the present day, they appear similarly to how a contemporary subculture (for example, goths) might operate semi-separately from mainstream culture. They follow their own set of rules, customs, and etiquette, yet they are still subject to the broader social systems at play. The overarching story of the series follows Bustamante as she meets a deity figure (played by Gabriela Ruiz), and then returns to narrate the series and explain how society has arrived at our current global circumstances. The project also serves as a mirror of primarily Latinx artists currently working in Los Angeles; each performer is an exciting figure in their own right and featured in their own episode inspired by their artwork.
California-born and internationally recognized, Nao Bustamante cut her teeth as an artist between 1984 and 2001 in San Francisco where she studied in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bustamante’s occasionally precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. As Kevin McGarry from The New York Times succinctly put it, “[Bustamante] has a knack for using her body.”
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...
Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Working independently, Herndon experimented at the forefront of a now-canonical method—appropriation—by painting additions into found images from magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated in a way that imbues the resulting works with mythical significance...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
On March 30, 2015, at 5:52am, David Horvitz caught his daughter, Ela Melanie, as she was being born, in the back of an Uber driving through Midtown Manhattan...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...