KIOTO AOKI

In Flux: Chicago Artists and Immigration is a continuation of the Living Architecture project presented by 6018|North. The exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center responds to the current political climate to highlight how Chicago was built with immigrant labor, particularly in the arts.

First opened to the public as the Reference Room in 1897, the Exhibit Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center featured windows along two sections of the west wall. The windows have since been bricked in and their remaining silhouettes become latent images of the past. The photographs acknowledge the history of the exhibition space, documenting the interior and exterior views of these gallery walls and calling attention to what once was. The images also recall various meanings of the frame, as a space that can define or defy the conceptual, physical, architectural, historical, geographical and photographic borders: a place of mobility.

frame, remnants, inflections
gelatin silver prints

Site specific film and book installation at 6018|North for Living Architecture, a large-scale, multidisciplinary exhibition highlighting the influence and impact of immigrant artists on Chicago.

Inspired by architect Bernard Cache's notion of inflections and acknowledging the lineage of architectural photographer Idaka Yuichi, the film activates two existing works at the gallery: "Shotgun" by First Office located in the basement and Vlatka Horvat's "Door to Door" on the second floor. The piece is installed as a projection in the closet, behind Horvat's piece of all the doors from the building. The books are pinhole images taken and installed in the stairwells, as a way to activate the space visitors pass through to go from the basement doors to the closet projection.

frame,ways,inflections | 2018
digital projection of 16mm, b/w, silent

frame,wells,inflection | 2018
archival inkjet artist books

frame, columns, inflection | 2019
Artist books that respond to the architecture of the installation space, highlighting the three supportive columns. Each column was photographed from four rotating vantage points, mirroring the movement of the body as one interacts with Shotgun. Each column has its own set of images photographed using a large format camera and the artists’ hand-made pinhole camera. Large format cameras were once the standard for architectural photography and the pinhole was used to photograph the original iteration of the work at 6018|North. The resulting books are folded in a way that structurally mimics the quadrants of Shotgun, the Duchampian door piece by First Office.

frame, ways, inflections | 2018
16mm, b/w, silent
digital floor projection

Second iteration of Living Architecture at Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City IN
October 30, 2019 - Jan 4, 2020

Film loop and photography installation. Projectors activated by sensors as viewer enters the space, enabling the viewer to be instigator of one layer of movement.

16mm film loops
gelatin silver photographs, printed from segments dance-movement film
2017

Low Residency MFA Show
Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Projection installation of Dual Enframe for Projections after Dark at Roman Susan

Chicago, IL | 2018

Two-person exhibition with Daniel Hojnacki at Apparatus Projects

"Daniel Hojnacki and Kioto Aoki seek to complicate photography’s often explicit relationships to memory, loss, visual legibility and light. Hojnacki and Aoki’s work engages deeply with photographic history and materiality in order to challenge assumptions about the finitude or descriptive quality of an image as a window into some other place or some other time. complicates photography’s often explicit relationships to memory, loss, visual legibility and light. Hojnacki and Aoki have developed a set of images that seeks to reintegrate a critical intimacy into the way we view a photograph: hands grasping at nothing, a flower that only blooms at night, negatives propped against a nightlight, and photographs of loved ones since gone. These images set the scene for a conversation about photography’s role in shaping our memories, desires and contradictions by translating a picture not only through our eyes, but through a gentle choreography interweaving surface, body, and light."

gelatin silver prints, night light, lumen prints
2019

images courtesy of Daniel Hojnacki