Purikura Party!

September 15, 2010 yanez

Whew! This past Sunday I spent a whole day at Pika Pika in Japantown on a purikura marathon. I arrived at 1:00pm and stayed for six hours while artists, academics, and activists came in to create purikura portraits with me. It was an exciting and exhausting day of starbursts, cartoon cacas, jeweled flowers, and cute skulls.

I’m feeling very confident in my abilities to teach purikura techniques after this weekend. Not guiding aesthetics but navigating the Japanese menus, deciphering the decoration screens, and managing the pressure of the countdown clocks shadowing every decision. Like my other recent purikura sessions I soaked in as much as I could about how each collaborator approached their decoration aesthetic. Below are the spoils of the day and you can really see the spectrum of what is possible in purikura portraits.

sisters — Jessica Martinez & Katynka Martinez

You can see a bunch of hi-res images from the day at my flickr album HERE. Below is my video documentation of the day set to M-flo’s Dopamine.

Peace,

Rio

Support System

September 4, 2010 yanez

These past few days have been intense and busy. I’ve been promoting My Mission, planning my yearly Day of the Dead exhibit, and balancing other creative projects. Chief among them is my full blown committal to purikura as an art form. Today I spent the early afternoon with Ms. Margarita (AKA Margarita Azucar) for another round of purikura art making. We met up following her radio show on radiovalencia.fm. On our way to Pikapika in Japantown we stopped off at her apartment and I saw something that made me smile so much.

Seeing these two cans propping up a window in Margarita Azucar’s apartment instantly brought me back to my childhood and warmed my heart. Growing up in an old San Francisco Victorian apartment my parents used all sorts of object to prop open our windows. We used books, old toys, Lincoln Logs, and other random things to keep our windows open on a hot day. I’m hella nostalgic right now.

Our purikura session went great! Ms. Margarita rocked an awesome pink wig and busted out with some great poses for the photos, she was truly like a Chicana superhero. I’ll be scanning the photos and posting them in the new couple of days. Stay tuned!

Peace,

Rio

La Pura Cura Purikura

July 7, 2010 yanez

This past weekend I embarked on my second collaboration with the brilliant and loco por sure Guillermo Gomez-Peña (along with members of his performance troupe La Pocho Nostra). Our project is La Pura Cura Purikura. It’s an ongoing project of purikura photos costumed, performed, and decorated by Gomez-Pena, facilitated and decorated by myself.

For this first shoot we were joined by La Pocha member Kika Olsen (below).

Gomez-Peña had the idea to dress himself as a post-apocalyptic border-shaman. With that in mind we all packed up our costumes and props and traveled to Pikapika in Japantown for a purikura adventure. Suffice to say we turned a few heads while we took photos and as Guillermo and Kika got into their characters amongst confused Japanese teenagers.

Below is a sampling of the images we created together. There are more planned Purikura sessions on the way with La Pocha Nostra so stay tuned! For a full gallery of La Pura Cura Purikura CLICK HERE.