MAKES:
Videos, potlucks, photographs, installations, tropical-scented cleaning agents for sniffing.
WAS SPEECHLESS WHEN:
A high-school friend told him, as though it were a compliment, “You’re the skinniest Samoan I’ve ever seen!”
HAS:
A love for the history of matcha tea.
Mario Lemafa only briefly romanticized art as a studio practice. “I come from performance,” Lemafa declared instead. In high school, it was musicals. In college, it was theater. But as a person of color, Lemafa ran into limitations immediately—and he fit in better with the performance-art crowd anyway.
A story Lemafa tells is like a line straight out of a joke about how to know when you’re a performance artist. For an early photo work, “I told my mother to put this houseplant on my face as I laid on the floor,” Lemafa told me, giggling.
It was a really big houseplant. The photo appeared in Lemafa’s 2012 graduation show from the University of Washington’s photomedia program, titled Be Tropical. The picture of Lemafa prone under a potted palm was tacked to the gallery wall with a palm-tree sticker. Stickers were juxtaposed with black-and-white images of aboriginal sculptures, hula girls, Elvis, and Lemafa pretty in pink beach towel and cap.
