USA Projects

Everybody has a past. For Native American performance artist James Luna and myself, that past began in Orange County -- land of malls, surfers and the 405 Freeway. How did we evolve from being ethnic minorities in suburbia to the artists we are today? And in the sea of consumerism and cultural amnesia, what makes an Indian or Asian American truly "authentic?"

James and I are asking your support to help us complete our new collaboration, Transitions: Survival Skills in a Suburban Landscape. In this project we revisit one of James Luna's performances from the 70's, also entitled Transitions, in which he unpacked a bag full of “Indian” objects and created a new rituals with them.

We'll spring board off the earlier work and unpack the metaphorical bag to revisit what's inside. We'll take a look at where our lives intersect, as ethnic artists, born and raised in Orange County. Together we'll conduct a series of rituals that recount surviving life behind the “Orange Curtain.” We'll be remixing surfing music, disco, narrative and home movies and surfing footage projected onto a psychedelic Okinawan kimono. The kimono bears 20 foot long arms that can be wrapped around Denise – like a cocoon or straight jacket – one of her “coming home” rituals.

Transitions is commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) for Los Angeles Goes Live as part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene, beginning this fall. Your contribution will directly support production and travel expenses for this new project, and ready it for premiere at LACE on November 10, 2011. This is a great opportunity to for us to work with LACE and the Getty and be part of this city-wide celebration. After the premiere we hope to continue to tour with this project and bring it to a community near you.

LACE had originally commissioned Uyehara to recreate a performance by an artist from the 70s and 80s, and she chose James Luna. But during the process of interviewing him on the La Jolla Indian Reservation she realized it would be more interesting for to create a piece together -- thus we have a new version of Transitions.

We are excited about our new project as it unfolds, and hope you could join us on this journey to complete it.

Thank you for your support!

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Luna is a Luiseno Indian and Mexican-American performance artist and multimedia installation artist who has received innumerable awards and was sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian to participate in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Uyehara is an award-winning artists who, for the two decades has been creating work around memory and what marks the body crossing borders of identity. Her work often deals with issues of ethnic fetish, queer/bi and feminist identity, war and occupation.

(Visit each artists' profile page for details: James Luna, Denise Uyehara)