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CFA Media Mixer 2015: Meet this Year’s Artists

March 30, 2015

We are SO EXCITED to announce the artists for this year’s CFA Media Mixer event – our annual video re-mix benefit held at the Hideout. Over the next couple of months each filmmaker will work closely with his musical pairing to create and score a short video piece made from digitized films from our vault. We’re currently loading up our filmmakers with loads and loads of footage of their choosing (plus a few curve balls chosen by our staff). This year’s lineup is so awesomely talented that I had to take a break from writing this and head towards a window and scream a little bit. We hope to see you at the Hideout on Thursday, June 18th to both support CFA and to watch the world premiere of three films made by our artist pairings.

This year’s artists (filmmakers listed first, followed by musician(s)) include:

Amir George + The O’Mys
Jesse Malmed + ONO
Fern Silva + Phil Cohran

More on this year’s artists:

THE FILMMAKERS:

Amir George Small

Amir George is a motion picture artist and film programmer born and bred in Chicago. Amir creates work for installation, the cinema and live performance. His video work and curated programs have been screened in festivals and galleries across the US, Canada, and Europe. In addition to founding Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization, Amir is also the co-curator of Black Radical Imagination a touring experimental short film program. He currently teaches and produces media with youth throughout Chicagoland. http://amirgeorge.com


Jesse Malmed1

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator, working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and overlaps. He has performed, screened and exhibited at museums, microcinemas, film festivals, galleries, bars and barns, including solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, Chicago Cultural Center among others. Additionally, Jesse programs at the Nightingale Cinema, co-directs the mobile exhibition space Trunk Show, programs through ACRE TV and spends part of each summer as a Visiting Artist Liaison with ACRE. His writing has appeared in Incite Journal, YA5, OMNI Reboot, Big Big Wednesday, Temporary Art Review, Bad at Sports and Cine-File. A native of Santa Fe, Jesse earned his BA at Bard College and his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a “2014 Breakout Artist” by Newcity, is a DCASE In The Works resident and is a 2014-15 Artistic Associate at Links Hall, where he is organizing the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival May 18-24 2015. http://jessemalmed.net


Fern Silva1

Fern Silva (b. 1982, Hartford, CT) uses film to create a cinematographic language for the hybrid mythologies of globalism. His films consider methods of narrative, ethnographic, and documentary filmmaking as the starting point for structural experimentation. He has created a body of film, video, and projection work that has been screened and performed at various festivals, galleries, museums and cinematheques including the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Edinburgh, Images, London and Ann Arbor Film Festivals, Anthology Film Archive, Gene Siskel Film Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, San Francisco Cinematheque, Museum of Art Lima, Cinemateca Boliviana, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, Museum of Modern Art P.S.1, and Cinema Du Reel and the Centre Pompidou. He was listed as one of the Top 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century in Film Comment Magazine’s Avant-Garde Filmmakers Poll, is the recipient of the Gus Van Sant Award from the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was nominated for Best International Short Film at the 2012 Edinburgh International Film Festival. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, MFA from Bard College and is currently based in Chicago, IL where he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. http://fernsilva.com


THE MUSICIANS: 

OMys Small

The O’My’s are the new sound of Chicago Soul. Rising stars in the midst of a Chicago music and cultural renaissance, The O’My’s have recorded and shared stages with Chance the Rapper, Wyclef Jean, ZZ Ward, Ab Soul, Twista, NoName Gypsy, Mick Jenkins, Save Money, Yo Yo Ma, and Kids These Days. A multi instrument, multi-ethnic crew, The O’My’s are led by co-founders and songwriters, singer/guitarist Maceo Haymes and keyboardist Nick Hennessey. The crew’s rhythm section is comprised of bassist Boyang Matsapola and drummer Barron Golden. Erick Mateo on sax, William Miller on trumpet, and J.P. Floyd (formerly of Kids These Days) on trombone complete the horn section. All Chicago natives, The O’My’s sound captures the tremendous love, pain, warmth and bitter cold found in the city’s streets. Delicate arrangements, a pounding rhythm section and soaring horns provide a perfect home for Haymes’ commanding, smokey rasp and smooth falsettos. Drawing from Chicago’s rich musical traditions of blues, jazz and rock, The O’My’s pick up where their musical forefathers left off, taking Roots Rock’n’Soul to the present. The O’My’s are now in studio recording their third project, Keeping the Faith, a Psychedelic Soul record slated for release in the late fall of 2014. http://theomysband.com + https://www.facebook.com/TheOmysBand


ONO

ONO‘s members span several generations, ethnicities, and genders, but at its core the group consists of Travis Travis Travis, P. Michael Ono and Shannon Rose. As Moniker Records explains, “ONOMATOPOEIA BEFORE MUSIC was the band’s founding principle, and this conflation of language and noise has always been deeply, if not explicitly, political…Founded in 1980 and reemerging in the late 00s with astonishing vehemence and an expansive, multi-generational lineup, they’ve been embraced by a more fertile and experimental Chicago scene. travis has always referred to fellow-founder P. Michael ONO as the ‘leader of the band,’ but anchor might be more appropriate—P. Michael’s groundswelling bass and nasty, insectoid beats are unquestionably the glue that binds the sprawling noise. But then there’s travis, whose fierce brilliance carries echoes of punk prophets like Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Gil Scott-Heron but is always pure, raging ONO…ONO’s original mission statement (1980) runs through this music more truly and deeply than ever, so to quote it in full and let it speak for itself: ONO1980// Experimental Performance, NOISE, and Industrial Poetry Performance Band; Exploring Gospel’s Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises.” http://ono1980.com +  https://www.facebook.com/onoband


Phil Cohran

“Women in wool hair chant their poetry. Phil Cohran gives us messages and music made of developed bone and polished and honed cult. It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration, the day-long Hour. It is the Hour of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival. On Forty-third and Langley black furnaces resent ancient legislatures of play and scruple and practical gelatin. They keep the fever in, fondle the fever. All worship the Wall.” – Gwendolyn Brooks, “Two Dedications: II The Wall August 27, 1967”

Born in 1927 in Oxford, Mississippi, Phil Cohran played with Sun Ra’s Arkestra and co-founded the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) before establishing the Affro-Arts Theater in 1967. The honorific title Kelan was bestowed on him by Chinese Muslims on a tour of China in 1991. 

More on Cohran’s career via The HistoryMakers:

In 1950, Cohran joined Jay McShann’s touring swing band, playing with Charlie Parker and Walter Brown. He recorded with McShann for Houston’s Peacock Records where he backed up Big Mama Thornton and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Drafted that year, Cohran trained Naval bands at Annapolis, Maryland. Discharged in 1952, Cohran moved to Chicago where he studied the Schillinger system and played with Jimmy Bell and Walter Perkins. For the balance of the 1950s, Cohran was a part of Sun Ra’s cutting edge Astral Infinity Arkestra where he played trumpet, zithers and harp on recordings such as Rocket Number Nine and We Travel the Spaceways…Cohran lives in Chicago, where many of his children are noted musicians in their own right.”

In 1966, Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble included Amina Claudine Myers, Ajramu, Larry King, Eugene Easton, Don Myric, Aaron Dodd, Bob Crowder, Pete Cosey, Charles Hany, Louis Satterfield, Verdeen White and Maurice White. The latter three later formed the nucleus of the musical group Earth, Wind and Fire, utilizing the thumb piano sounds pioneered by Cohran. One of his 1966 concerts at 63rd Street Beach in Chicago drew 3,000 people. As founding director of the Affro Arts Theatre in 1967, Cohran hosted a weekly cultural extravaganza that featured poets like, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Carolyn Rodgers and Useni Eugene Perkins; dancers like Darlene Blackburn and Alyo Tolbert; and musicians from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) that he founded with Muhal Richard Abrams. In 1968, Cohran left Affro Arts to teach at Malcom X College.

From 1975 to 1977, Cohran operated Transitions East, a Chicago Southside venue featuring music and health food. In the 1980s, Cohran twice co-chaired Artists for Harold Washington. In 1987, he composed the award-winning music for the Sky Show at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. His music has been featured in countless venues including the Chicago Jazz Festival. Honored numerous times for his musicianship and teaching, Cohran was honored with the name “Kelan” by Chinese Muslims while on tour in 1991.

Cohran lives in Chicago, where many of his children are noted musicians in their own right.

For even more on Cohran and his amazing career we recommend reading “Blues and the Abstract Truth” – by PETER SHAPIRO (The Wire magazine, issue 207, May 2001). http://philcohran.com

 


 

Again, we hope to see you on Thursday, June 18th at the Hideout! Head on over to the event page for more info (raffle prizes, DJs, general excitement & more!): http://www.chicagofilmarchives.org/current-events/4th-annual-cfa-media-mixer

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