Photo/Foto: Lorie Novak

Sans Gravity

Water can symbolize many things, but often it is associated with knowledge and emotion; both of which are difficult to define in logical terms. In the installation/performance space of Sans Gravity, Bustamante explores the metaphors associated with water in the physical realm by burdening her body. The weight and the movement of the water develop into extensions of the gesture and another layer of the distorted self. The audience becomes a mechanism of relief.

Biography

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance art pioneer originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. She received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in the field of New Genres. Her work encompasses performance art, installation, video, pop music and experimental rips in time. Some of Her collaborators include Coco Fusco, D.L. Alvarez, and Chico MacMurtrie. Bustamante's work has been presented, among other sites at, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She has performed in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico and of course the United States. Most recently she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and a residency to develop an interactive web site through the Franklin Furnace in New York. Using the body as a source of image, narrative and emotion, Nao's performances communicate on the level of subconscious language taking the spectator on a bizarre journey, with haunting images, cracking stereotypes by embodying them. America, the beautiful originated at the improvisational festival, Engaging the Imagination (San Francisco). America... now a fully developed exploration, finds it's nature to be flux and evolutionary.

Video