The Wooden People

2021 - Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

7 episodes, 7:00 minutes per episodes (49:00 minutes total)

Nao Bustamante


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.”


Colors:



Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...

The Crime of Art
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2017

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)...

Eridanus
© » KADIST

David Horvitz

2017

The title of the work Eridanus refers to the constellation of the river of ancient Athens that meanders across in the night sky...

This is not in Spanish
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2011

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...

Paint, Unpaint
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2014

Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California
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Sharon Lockhart

2011

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...

The American War
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Harrell Fletcher

2005

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...

Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

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...

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger
© » KADIST

Geoffrey Farmer

2009

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...

Scene I am Cuba
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Felipe Dulzaides

2006

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...

Dorian, a cinematic perfume
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Michelle Handelman

2009

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...

Watercolors Lost in Airports (LHR on 01/14/2014)
© » KADIST

David Horvitz

2014

“On April 13 a painting was lost at JFK airport while going through the security screening...

Mickey Mouse
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Paul McCarthy

2010

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...

Stanley "Tom" Durrell, Tinsmith
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

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...

The Simpson Verdict
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2002

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...

I Want You
© » KADIST

Tony Labat

2008

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...

White Angel
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Fran Herndon

1962

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...

Irma Vep, The Last Breath
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Michelle Handelman

2015

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...

baby born in the back of an uber
© » KADIST

David Horvitz

2021

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...