Nao Bustamante

Find Yourself Through Me

My issues have centered around women, wholeness, body and in particular how the aesthetics of the body are judged, probed and replicated over and over. Myself, my body, her body becomes not only an issue of esteem, but one of political and economical power. I believe that my responsibility is to reflect back that which society has given me. In this process I became acutely aware that I didn’t see myself in the actual space around me. In the work “Find Yourself Through Me” it allows me to create an artificial landscape in which to reflect my own image or at least one image suspended in time. It lets the viewer/participant merge with an under-representation, there by distinguishing oneself, in this age a digital reproduction, underneath the surface.

Biography

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance art pioneer originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her work encompasses performance art, installation, video, pop music and experimental rips in time. 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. Her collaborations include working with such luminaries as Coco Fusco and Osseus Labrint. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship. Currently she is living in Troy, New York and an assistant professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.