About the Exhibition
Rm 921: Reflections on Practice
October 1 – December 31, 2024
On view, from October through December is Reflections on Practice, an exhibition featuring films and video work from Kioto Aoki, Lois Bielefeld, and Yuge Zhou for Elevate: Rm 921. Projected onto a 48-foot wall, the exhibition is only viewable after dusk and from the windows of 21c Chicago guest rooms with interior-facing windows. Designed to showcase immersive and experiential moving-image work in response to the unique space, Elevate: Rm 921 addresses complex issues that shape our diverse and rapidly changing world.
Reflections on Practice is about ritual, performance, and finding meaning in the everyday. Kioto Aoki, Lois Bielefeld, and Yuge Zhou use their bodies in space to engage in acts of labor, observation, and ritual. Through their films and videos, each artist takes the viewer to a different location in a series of meditative practices.
Kioto Aoki’s 16 mm films Exploratory Conservation and Mornings in Orange exemplify her studio practice which navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity, responding to and formed by observations and experiences of the everyday. The artist’s body and the human form become an inflection point oscillating between personal, communal, and universal experiences. The body activates, holds, and navigates propositions of sight and relativity as playful expressions of visual and formal imprints of presence.
Lois Bielefeld’s Chair Studies were performed and filmed at Acre Residency in 2022, where ample amounts of chairs were dispersed throughout the rural Wisconsin grounds. These chairs offered uncharted support and respite to countless artists across many years of artist residencies serving as an inspiration to Bielefeld who states, “Sometimes it’s about play, sometimes it’s about doing a thing… and sometimes it’s about nothing at all but a compulsion. I could tell you it’s about queering a domestic object and queering movement, of which both are true. But does it matter? These are experiments, or studies, relating to space and a place in a playful and meditative way.”
In traditional Chinese culture, the moon is a carrier of human emotions. The full moon symbolizes family reunion. Due to travel restrictions between 2020 and 2022, Yuge Zhou was barred from traveling to Beijing to see her family. While waiting to return, Zhou created the video series Moon Drawings, intending to bring the moon down to her on Earth, inspired by a Chinese legend of the Han dynasty. Every winter and summer, Zhou filmed herself alone tracing moon patterns by dragging a suitcase on the snow-covered ground in the parking lot adjacent to her apartment building in Chicago and a summer counterpart of the same ritual on a sandy beach on the shores of Lake Michigan, as if to create circular mantras suspended in a time of waiting.
