Tag: MONOMYTHS Stage 12

MONOMYTHS artist portrait, 2016. Photo by Henry Chan.

USA
www.naobustamante.com

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from the San Joaquin Valley of California; cutting her teeth as an artist in the San Francisco “Art Scene” between 1984-2001. She attended San Francisco Art Institute, where she fell under the influence of the notorious New Genres Department. Bustamante’s at times precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing.

Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Arts, Sundance 2008, 2010, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Her movies have been shown at venues and festivals across the globe, including OUTFEST – Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, MIX New York City, MIX Brasil, and the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Bustamante is popularly known for her appearance in the Bravo Network television show A Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, where she made her mark as a messy and complex character. 

The Theatre Communications Group in the book, Out of the Fringe, as well as the Theatre Drama Review, published by the MIT Press, has published Bustamante. In 2000 she received the GLBT Historical Society Arts Award. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 She received the Chase Legacy award in Film (In conjunction with Kodak and HBO). And was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the (Short-term) CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and also a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation.  Currently Bustamante is the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and preparing for an upcoming solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection.

Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres program and the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture as a Video Fellow. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin.
Presented by FADO in association with The Theatre Centre and sponsored by Images Festival.

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons—both inner and outer—in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

MONOMYTHS Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds
Silver & Gold
Nao Bustamente (performed with Zachary Murphy)

Silver & Gold combines film, live performance, and original costumes into a hyrbid work that Nao Bustamante proclaims a “filmformance.” In this filmformance, Bustamante evokes the muse of legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen.

The performance alternates between action and live narration of a film projection. In the film, inspired by iconic underground filmmaker Jack Smith, Bustamante interprets Smith’s muse: 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez. Honing-in on Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with filmic reproduction of the exotic, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Using video, live voiceover, audience interaction, and the body as a source of backdrop, narrative, and emotion, she takes the spectator on a bizarre and radical journey as she discovers a new bejeweled body part, which is at once her curse and oracle. This performance is the fruit of a commission by the LIVE FILM/ Jack Smith festival, co-organized by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater (HAU) in Berlin. 

Watch the trailer of Silver & Gold.

Conceived and curated by Jess Dobkin and Shannon Cochrane

MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons–both inner and outer–in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

Joseph Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) prescribes a common pattern to all of the world’s mythic narratives. According to this fundamental structure, the archetypal hero is challenged to embark on a monumental quest. Over the course of the hero’s journey, trials and obstacles must be overcome until a victory is won and the hero returns home with new knowledge about himself and the world. Campbell’s concept of the monomyth (‘one myth’) is a recognizable motif in both ancient mythology and contemporary culture, including film, music, literature, sports, and advertising. A current trend in popular visual culture replaces the male character with a female one, in spite of the fact that our heroine–from the get-go–would make different choices if the conditions, and conditioning, allowed. While each MONOMYTHS stage stands alone, the work of each presenting artist is interdependent and connected. These independent visions, when stitched together through the audience’s collective presence, form an exquisite corpse of a larger experimental narrative.

The year-long MONOMYTHS project is presented in three sections starting in February 2016 and concluding in February 2017.

Part 1 (February 3–7, 2016)
Stage 1: The Ordinary World/Call to Adventure
Stage 2: Refusal of the Call
Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor
Stage 4: Crossing the Threshold
Stage 5: Belly of the Whale

Part 2 (May 2016–January 2017)
Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies
Stage 7: Ordeals
Stage 8: Atonement with the Father/State
Stage 9: Apotheosis/Journey to the Inmost Cave

Part 3 (February 15–19, 2017)
Stage 10: The Road Back
Stage 11: Refusal of the Return
Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds
Stage 13: Freedom to Live
Stage 14: The Return Home