“A Celebration,” a new video artwork at 150 Media Stream created by experimental filmmaker Colin Mason, will showcase images from home movies in Chicago Film Archives collections. 150 Media Stream is a large-scale digital art installation spanning a 150 foot LED wall in downtown Chicago curated by Yuge Zhou.
Slowed down and blown up to the scale of 150 Media Stream’s video wall, the archive’s moving image records of private lives will be brought into the public eye as a monumental opportunity for reflection upon our timeless interconnectedness as Midwesterners.
The project will premiere during a public reception in the lobby of 150 North Riverside Plaza on Thursday, February 26, 2026, and will be on view through Saturday, July 4, 2026.
Location
In the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza.
Enter through the Randolph Street entrance.
Public Viewing Hours
Thursday, February 26 – Saturday, July 4, 2026
Monday – Friday 4pm – 7pm — Saturdays 11am – 5pm
Free and open to the public.
On Thursday, February 26, please join us for two special events:
- Thursday, February 26th, 2026 from 12-1pm
Lunchtime activation: Highlights from the Chicago Film Archives
- Thursday, February 26th, 2026 from 6-8pm
Public reception featuring a panel discussion, analog projector demonstration, and light refreshments. Add this event to your calendar.
ABOUT THE WORK
“A Celebration” is a large-format video collage made up of home movies from various family collections held by the Chicago Film Archives. The work is inspired by the overwhelming abundance of celebrations captured on film in the mid-20th century. While these moving images of “good times past” create a nostalgic feeling in the viewer, this is partly a result of analog film’s economic and practical limitations: people could not record every second of their lives with pictures — often only the best times were filmed.
In the introduction to her novel Figuring, Maria Popova posits that “History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.” The moving images collaged together into this project are historic, they are what survived, but they are only a small portal into the largely unrecorded lives of the people depicted on screen. With a critical approach to nostalgia, experimental filmmaker Colin Mason has assembled these home movies into a video installation piece that embraces recorded celebrations as an invitation to imagine the unrecorded ellipses between them. What did people want to be remembered for? What didn’t make the cut? Like the home movies themselves, the resulting project falls somewhere between selectivity and banality, an illusionistic highlight reel of people’s everyday lives.
This project features home movies from the Frank Miyamoto Collection, Ernest F. Ledbetter Collection, Jack Baker Collection, Marquis Ritchey Cring Collection, Don McIlvaine Collection, Glick-Berolzheimer Collection, John Dame Collection, and the Wittman Family Collection.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Colin Mason is an experimental filmmaker and film programmer based in Chicago. As filmmaker, Colin repurposes archival material to explore themes of bodies, queerness, media, and memory. His 2023 collage film, “this land is your land,” won the Best Experimental Film award at the DePaul Premiere Film Festival and played in multiple other film programs. As film programmer, Colin has served on the screening committees of the Chicago International Film Festival, the Onion City Experimental Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He additionally served as President of the Depaul Experimental Film Club for two years and is currently the curatorial assistant at 150 Media Stream.
ABOUT 150 MEDIA STREAM
Located in the lobby of 150 N Riverside Plaza in Chicago, 150 Media Stream is a public digital art installation divided into 89 LED blades. It stretches over 150 feet long and reaches 22 feet high, the largest structure of its kind in the city. Launched in 2017, 150 Media Stream has showcased over fifty commissioned works by emerging and renowned local and international media artists.
Curated by Chicago-based video artist Yuge Zhou, the 150 Media Stream Arts Program forges strategic partnerships with many of Chicago’s major academic and artistic institutions, providing a forum for students and cultural practitioners to exhibit and promote their work in a dynamic and iconic environment.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Yuge Zhou is a Chinese-born, Chicago-based video artist and filmmaker whose work addresses rootedness, cohabitation, and social encounters across urban spaces. Yuge has exhibited nationally and internationally in prominent art and public venues, most recently across 95 billboards in Times Square, NYC. Her work has been featured in the New York Magazine, Hyperallergic and Frieze, and acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Yuge is the recipient of the 2024 Joyce Foundation Artadia Award and a 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Media Arts from Illinois Arts Council.