On Thursday, June 6th, 2024 at Constellation, Chicago Film Archives will host the premiere of three new works created for the “Media Mixer: Homemade” project by pairs of Chicago artists.
Doors will open at 7 PM and the program will begin at 8 PM.
The Media Mixer project started in 2012 as a way to open up CFA’s vault of archival footage to artists working in media, and to support the creation of new video works by pairing visual and sound artists. At the heart of the Media Mixer is a desire to give CFA’s archival collections new life through the creative interpretation of Chicago artists.
This year, each artist pair is working with the home movies of an individual family, and will meet with members of those families to gain a sense of who each family is beyond what is seen and depicted in their home movies.
The 2024 Media Mixer artists are:
working with the Lieb-Hootnick Family Collection
Caitlin Ryan and Johanna Brock
working with the Glick-Berolzheimer Collection
working with the Frank Miyamoto Collection
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This year’s event will be hosted by Romi Crawford.
The 2024 Media Mixer curator is Emily Eddy.
Something to look forward to: at this year’s Media Mixer, we’re going to be holding a fun raffle to help support CFA’s programs!
Our thanks to:
Roscoe Village Bikes for donating a $500 gift certificate
Pitchfork Music Festival for donating two 3-day passes to the festival
Deerpath Golf Course for donating a foursome of golf at their historic course
MEET THE 2024 ARTISTS
Kioto Aoki
Kioto Aoki is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician, whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity. Grounded in the analogue image and image-making process and through tangential vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema, she forms a rhetoric of nuanced quietude responding to and formed by observations and experiences of the everyday. Often in her work, the body activates, holds, and navigates the propositions of sight and relativity, through notions of structural tangibility and material or site-specificity.
Kioto’s work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and private collections. Musical projects include solo albums, Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING, Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and Soundtrack series at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Chicago Cultural Center, 6018|North (Chicago), Gallery Kobo Chika (Tokyo, Japan), The Lab (San Francisco), and the Barbican Centre (London), among others. She received her BFA & MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Johanna Brock
Johanna Brock (née Wiesbrock, pronouns she/they) is a musician, composer, and teacher based in Chicago. A trained orchestral violist, Brock takes inspiration from modern and canonical work for violin and viola, creating new compositions using voice, synthesizers, and audio samples. Working with layered sound, noise, and improvisation, Brock’s music explores the boundary between sound and linguistic meaning. They are currently working in collaborations with the improvised string ensemble Akjai, the sound/art project Barbiefoot, and the dance/music project Lykanthea. Brock’s most recent long-form work, created with visual artist Sofia Moreno, will be featured in the gallery exhibition of “Flores Nocturnas” at the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire in March 2024. This June, Brock joins the new-music ensemble a.peri.odic for a performance of the work of Chicago composer Renée Baker, and this Fall, Brock is looking forward to participating in the performance of Lykanthea’s new album at the MCA.
Fire-Toolz
The music of Fire-Toolz draws energy on a moment-to-moment basis from the constant fluctuation between seemingly disparate styles, yet Marcloid pulls off the impossible feat again and again of making chaotic deviations and improbable jump-cuts between ideas sound holistic, as if such compositional gambits were already logical to begin with. To Angel, there’s nothing off-putting about black metal vocals and bursts of tape-collage harsh noise layered over emotionally potent new age synth-scapes and nature foley. In her world, blending mathcore cybergrind drum programming with 80s jazz fusion and sensual guitar solos was never intended to be some special feat. That’s just how her mind works. Industrial no-wave and second-wave emo were meant to be together. *Especially* if there is a tape delay-laden sax solo & piercing no-input mixer feedback. The overarching rhythm of a Fire-Toolz song lays out a sine wave of inhalations and exhalations, a network of sudden detonations that punctuate the flow between meditation and progressive maximalism. The format of a one-person “band” carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting abstract modernist productions that don’t allude in the slightest to various twentieth-century rock-related traditions. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide.
Henry Hanson
Henry is a filmmaker and programmer based in Chicago. His self-produced, self-distributed directorial debut “Bros Before” screened at dozens of venues internationally while gaining notoriety as an online cult hit. They curate and produce multimedia screening events both independently and through their job at Full Spectrum Features, presenting fresh, radical, and under-seen cinema with an emphasis on the queer/trans underground. His debut feature Dog Movie will premiere in 2024.
AJ McClenon
A.J. McClenon is a multimedia artist born and raised in Washington, DC and currently residing in Chicago who communicates through text & language, movement, repurposed materials, moving images, and sound. A.J.’s work is driven by familial & collective grief, water, science, escapism, Blackness, geomorphology, US history, and the global future. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching and community collaborations with the goal that all the memories and histories that are said to have “too many Black people,” are told and retold again.
Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan is a real Reba of the art world…’a single mom who works two jobs.’ Ryan is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the nuances between comedy and humor, specifically using the vernacular of the uncanny to investigate systems of anthropology. I am interested in small underground (and sometimes temporary) communities to observe perspectives that push the boundaries of what it means to have radical empathy.
Ryan received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has most recently shown works at Airlock, Iceberg Projects, Flatlands, Gallery 400, and Hyde Park Art Center. She has also screened works at Onion City Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, Cosmic Rays,and the Nightingale Cinema.