ABOUT THE PROJECT

“A Celebration” is a large-format video collage made up of home movies from various family collections held by the Chicago Film Archives. The work is inspired by the overwhelming abundance of celebrations captured on film in the mid-20th Century. While these moving images of “good times past” create a nostalgic feeling in the viewer, this is partly a result of analog film’s economic and practical limitations: people could not record every second of their lives with pictures—often only the best times were filmed. 

In the introduction to her novel Figuring, Maria Popova posits that “History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.” The moving images collaged together into this project are historic, they are what survived, but they are only a small portal into the largely unrecorded lives of the people depicted on screen. With a critical approach to nostalgia, experimental filmmaker Colin Mason has assembled these home movies into a video installation piece that embraces recorded celebrations as an invitation to imagine the unrecorded ellipses between them. What did people want to be remembered for? What didn’t make the cut? Like the home movies themselves, the resulting project falls somewhere between selectivity and banality, an illusionistic highlight reel of people’s everyday lives. 

This project features home movies from the Frank Miyamoto Collection, Ernest F. Ledbetter Collection, Jack Baker Collection, Marquis Ritchey Cring Collection, Don McIlvaine Collection, Glick-Berolzheimer Collection, John Dame Collection, and the Wittman Family Collection.

ARTIST BIO

Colin Mason is an experimental filmmaker and film programmer based in Chicago. As filmmaker, Colin repurposes archival material to explore themes of bodies, queerness, media, and memory. His 2023 collage film, “this land is your land,” won the Best Experimental Film award at the DePaul Premiere Film Festival and played in multiple other film programs. As film programmer, Colin has served on the screening committees of the Chicago International Film Festival, the Onion City Experimental Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He additionally served as President of the Depaul Experimental Film Club for two years and is currently the curatorial assistant at 150 Media Stream.

ABOUT THE PIECE

Stream is a Renaissance-style silent composition of a very large crowd pausing to witness something captivating yet unnamed. Featuring over 150 individuals, including many Chicagoans, the artwork draws a frame around the notion of community and the shared experiences that make up daily life in a large city.

“How does a city heal from being separated for so long, when so much of its interactions are in person, face to face? I created this idea after waiting for my first train ride post-pandemic. It was beautiful to see faces again, to see people smile and scream and cry on the subway. I wanted to capture this feeling of beauty and anxiety.”
— Gabriel Barcia-Colombo

Within the artwork, some observers stand in contemplative thought while others snap photos of the awe-inspiring subject, intentionally omitted from the screen. Are these individuals merely observing, or are they participating in something sublime, confounding, or even disturbing? Evocative of a Greek chorus, which comments on collective hopes, fears and joys, Stream turns the tables on the dynamic between spectacle and audience. Moreover, it serves as a reflection on the barometers of social connection, often overshadowed by our mobile devices and technological distractions.

With media artist Adam Berg’s technical support, the piece randomly generates the stream of people in real time.