Performance artist Jasmine Nyende, 23, weaves together her history and South L.A.’s history at Art Los Angeles Contemporary this weekend.
Jasmine Nyende was 12 years old when she started fiddling with her family’s video camera. These early experiments inadvertently chronicle her childhood in Leimert Park, a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of change in the past decade or so. Now 23, the performance artist is weaving the footage together with poetry about her past as well as social media postings that represent other people’s perceptions of her past for a program at Art Los Angeles Contemporary this weekend.
“I’m relating this idea to the media I was producing — the statuses, the photos, the media I am making as related to me growing up in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles as a cultural capital, and myself as cultural capital,” Nyende explains. “The play is called Lost Angles, and it plays off of Los Angeles and camera angles and this idea of something getting lost in translation or something that is hidden — maybe a view that we usually won’t see.”
Nyende usually includes herself in her work, which includes both her online and offline activities. Her interest in deleted statuses on social media sites points to the performative nature of these platforms, which viewers and participants have a naive tendency to take at face value.
Read the full story on LA WEEKLY: http://www.laweekly.com/arts/a-leimert-park-performance-artist-weaves-together-social-media-and-south-la-history-7867002
