Nao Bustamante
Silver & Gold
Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the 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. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.
California-born and internationally recognized, Nao Bustamante cut her teeth as an artist between 1984 and 2001 in San Francisco where she studied in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bustamante’s occasionally precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. As Kevin McGarry from The New York Times succinctly put it, “[Bustamante] has a knack for using her body.”