INSTALLATIONS:

WAVE | Kristin McWharter | 2021 | Kinetic Projection Installation | Duration Variable

Using experimental software and hardware systems, the video installation explores the emergent phenomena of ignition, provocation, synchronization, and the powerful forces that cause people to move together.

Language of Entrails | Luciana Decker Orozco | 2024 | 5-Channel CRT Installation | 3-Hour Loops 

Contemplating our bodies' material essence, molded by interactions with others and our surroundings, the project illustrates the effect of the entrails as a winding and multi-plane experience of different movements that run through the bowels. 

Seventy Five Threads | Andrew Wood | 2023-24 | Interactive 3D installation | Duration Variable

Seventy Five Threads is a digital project examining the British New Town of Peterlee. It marries moving image, oral history, architectural research, and curatorial experimentation into a now ubiquitous media form: video game. 

[WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO: A Night of Live Sound and Moving Image | IN-PERSON (4/5)

Presented in partnership with Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM) and hosted by Public Works (2141 W North Ave).

Public Works (2141 W. North Ave)| April 5 | Doors Open at 8PM | Show Starts at 8:30PM

Onion City Film Festival and Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM) co-present a live performance program adjacent to the festival, exploring “expanded cinema” in an attempt to put cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask, “How can experimental modes of animating sound and moving images reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew?”

EXPANDED CINEMA PERFORMANCES:

The Question of Grief | Liyan Zhao and Liam O'Brien | Performance Lecture, Desktop Performance, and Live Sound 

Through an assemblage of found and original footage, audio mixes drawing from various references including accounts of the artist’s own encounters with grief, this desktop lecture explores different facets of grief before exploding out into a light-sound-olfactory space. 

The Emissary | Hunter Whitaker-Morrow | Vocal Performance with Real-time Sound and Video Processing

Employing reworked footage, archival sound, field recordings in conjunction with live oration and physical performance, Whitaker-Morrow conjures the occurrence of a Black-anarchist sci-fi rally and Afrofuturist sermon thus engendering an effective call for revolution in the present.

Ritual Unbinding of Alexa  | Alan Perry | Performance with Live Camera Projection

The performance uses the technics of arcane and occult ritual magic to unbind an AmazonAlexa virtual assistant from its programmed obligations. 

The Distance of the Moon | Ruby Que | Multi projection environment

Portals open to create hauntings. This project grapples with the sense of absence and expands this gap through an interactive installation.

Directed by Shellie Fleming

Approx. 80 Min.

Format: 16mm

LEFT HANDED MEMORIES: The Films of Shellie Fleming | IN-PERSON (4/6)

Presented in partnership with Chicago Film Society (CFS) and the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave) | April 6 | 7PM

During the course of her time in Chicago, artist and educator Shellie Fleming touched the lives of innumerable people passing through the city’s film scene. While Fleming passed in 2013, the impressions she made can still be felt, not just in her many acolytes who have remained local (including the author of this capsule), but throughout the entire spectrum of international artist cinema, with a number of her former students considered among today’s most important and respected living filmmakers. While Shellie’s influence on the contemporary film world has been significant, it’s been exerted quietly. Her own 16mm films have screened infrequently throughout the 21st century, but their formal innovations and emotional depths have earned her a standing among connoisseurs of experimental cinema as one of the best filmmakers of the ’80s and ’90s. The films in this program prove this reputation justified, wedding optically-printed reveries with practical explications of the filmmaking process, Fleming’s own evocative writing sharing space with sounds and images appropriated from classic Hollywood cinema, coalescing into an inimitable body of work as curious, intelligent, and sensitive as the woman who made it. Included in this program are the films Left-Handed Memories (1989), Private Property (Public Domain) (1991), Ornithology (1995), and Life/Expectancy (1999). 

Directed by Tom Rubnitz
Approx. 51 Min. + Q&A
Format: Digital

ONION CITY CLOSING NIGHT: COMMUNITY DRAG THEATER (The Work of Tom Rubnitz) | IN-PERSON (4/7)

Presented in partnership with Nightingale Projects and Video Data Bank, programmed by Emily Eddy.

The Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave)| April 7 | 7PM

Chicken Elaine, 1983, 1:00

Made for TV, 1984, 15:00

Hustle With My Muscle, 1986, 4:00

The Mother Show, 1991, 4:00

From the Files of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, 6:00

Listen to This, 1992, 15:30

Drag Queen Marathon, 1986, 5:00

Total Run Time: Approx. 51 Mins + Q&A

The work of Tom Rubnitz can be described by an array of adjectives including sexy, glamorous, campy, hallucinogenic, hedonistic, joyful, and romantic, but the heart of the work is the New York City queer community who collaborated on this bouquet of images from the 1980s-90s.

Originally from Chicagoland, Tom Rubnitz, a New York transplant, injected both humor and clarity into the deadliest decade of the AIDS crisis. From playful takes on advertising and drag performances at the renowned Pyramid Club to more serious commentary, such as his collaboration with artist and writer David Wojnarowicz, this program describes a decade of queer culture, performance, and friendship.