On Thursday, June 22nd, 2023, Chicago Film Archives will host the premiere of three new Media Mixer works at Constellation.
This year’s event will be hosted by Amy Beste, curator of Conversations at the Edge over at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Director of Public Programs and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The 2023 Media Mixer artists are (video and sound):
Paige Taul + olula negre
Jose Luis Benavides + Conjunto Primitivo
Zachary Hutchinson + Haruhi Kobayashi
The 2023 Media Mixer curator is Emily Eddy. Emily Eddy is the Director of the Nightingale Cinema where she has curated film, video, and media works since 2013. She currently teaches in the department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the Creative Writing department at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
Chicago Film Archives and Optimus present this year’s Media Mixer artists
Paige Taul
Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work engages with and challenges assumptions of black cultural expression and notions of belonging through experimental cinematography. As a part of her filmmaking practice, she tests the boundaries of identity and self-identification through autoethnography to approach notions of racial authenticity. She is a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, IL.
olula negre
A grandchild of twin migrations fleeing the effects of US imperialism in the American South and Puerto Rico that converged on Cleveland, OH, experimental sound artist and activist olula negre, is a cellist, improviser, composer, and visual artist whose work is rooted in their Black American and Latinx heritage, queerness and their interests in speculative fiction/storytelling and cosmic workings. olula is a co-curator of AfriClassical Futures, a quarterly concert and conversation series in Chicago that features musicians whose work intersects music of the Black diaspora and Western Classical music. They are currently a resident in the 2022/23 cohort of the Dark Matter Residency at Elastic Arts.
Jose Luis Benavides
Jose Luis Benavides is a Latinx and queer video artist, photographer, and lecturer for the City Colleges of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and Tennessee State University. Born-and-raised in Chicago, he works primarily with a range of personal archives. His videos explore issues relating to gender and sexuality, cultural erasure, migration, and institutionalized violence.
Conjunto Primitivo
Formed in 2019 by Cesar Robles Santacruz & Ana Belén García-Higgins, Conjunto Primitivo originated as an invitation from Cesar to Ana to do vocals on a simple drum machine recording. This recording was then included on CR15, a compilation put out that year by local electronic label, Chicago Research. From then on, the duo nurtured this minimalistic sound by sending each other playlists full of cumbia, industrial, reggaeton, techno, dembow, and more. This bridge of sounds eventually culminated as their first LP, written, recorded, and produced by the duo itself. Released August 2022 through Chicago Research, Conjunto Primitivo’s ‘Morir Y Renacer’ is a collage of dark synthesizers and a wealth of rhythms, both tender and ferocious, familiar yet cryptic.
Zachary Hutchinson
Zachary Hutchinson (b. 1991) is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Chicago, IL. Hutchinson came to Chicago in 2010 to attend school at the School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) where she earned her BFA in Studio Art in 2015. She continued her education at the University of Illinois – Chicago (UIC) earning a MFA in Moving Image in 2017. Hutchinson’s work demonstrates how gender performativity is treated as abject by normative society while embracing that abjection as a form of reclamation. She creates work in many methods including sculpture, drawing, performance, filmmaking, 3D sculpting and many more. She has shown work globally in places like Montreal; Mexico City; San Francisco, CA; NYC; Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Austin, TX; Berlin, Germany; Athens, Greece; Glasgow, UK; Iceland; Venice; and extensively in Chicago IL. In 2020 Hutchinson was listed as one of the Chicago Film 50. Since 2017 she has been teaching as an adjunct associate professor at UIC and since 2022 as a lecturer at SAIC.
Haruhi Kobayashi
Haruhi is a multi-media artist, sound designer and engineer with a love for all things sound, any shape and form. She uses her voice and electronics to create landscapes, and tries to incorporate story telling wherever she can. She occasionally uses the bass as an alternative to her lower frequencies.
The 2023 Media Mixer is possible thanks to the generous support of Constellation and Cutters Studios.