ART REVIEWS : Yonemotos’ Installation Gets a Layered Look

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s new video installation at Blum & Poe Gallery is a more than usually poetic meditation upon the ever-accelerating half-life of memory, both cultural and personal.

“A Matter of Memory” is concise without being brief--precisely what one hopes of poetry. It consists of a glass-topped table with a laser-disc player and video projector housed below, and a glass vase filled with water on top. Layered images are projected into the still water: a sugar cube that slowly dissolves, and superimposed on that, a stream of 1950s television commercials alternating with a photographic portrait of the brothers as children, taken when they were children.

Here, the Yonemotos shift away from their usual large scale. These images are diminutive, suggesting the preciousness not only of the doll-like little boys, but also of the advertising icons of the period: Mr. Clean, an animated housewife with starched apron and miniature cartoon house and so on. The sugar against which these tiny personages are silhouetted is likewise meant to suggest their very sweetness.

And yet, little nostalgia is evinced. Inexorably, the sentiment dissolves into candied sediment, only to reclaim its traces and begin the process of dissolution again. Nothing is lost, but neither is anything gained. Private reveries and public fantasies are both cast as self-deceptions that the mass media ensure we endlessly replay--even though they take us nowhere, except where they make us think we want to go.

* Blum & Poe, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Oct. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.