Elastro A/V presents a 2-day festival of durational audio and video installations and performances from a wide range of local audiovisual Chicago artists! Curated by Ruby Que, Asya Dubrovina, and castroduperly. This festival is made possible with support from the mediaThe Foundation.
In the early evening of night one Ruby Que has curated a set of installation works titled Travelogues that will be live throughout the space all night. Participating artists are Ále Campos, Bun Stout, Blair St. George Wright, Sara Sowell, Nick Briz, and Adrian Wood. Doors at 6pm
The later evening program titled Still Becoming begins at 8pm and is curated by castroduperly. It will have live performances from Fetter, Yiyi Liu, Ava Wanbli, A.J. McClenon, Fleming, and Hunter Whitaker-Morrow.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Fetter makes heavy noise pop to dance and weep to. Oscillating between ethereal and pounding, her all-hardware, largely improvised live sets take listeners through a foggy wilderness of saturated rhythms and menacing synth lines, her golden voice guiding the way through. Sonic inspirations include 80s industrial music, noise, early 2000s electropop, and sacred choral music. Fetter is the musical moniker of multimedia artist, Jessica Tucker, whose work playfully examines how interactions between bodies and media technologies condition experiences of agency and identity. She creates performances, videos, and installations that restage everyday virtual activities as complex embodiments that reveal and distort our deepest desires.
Fleming (they/them) is a queer multidisciplinary artist and writer, and a long term member of a network of DIY underground creative communities in the United States. They are engaged in the work of constantly questioning what liberation looks like and how to achieve it, through the analysis and growth out of the constructs and systems that inhibit it. Ultimately, whether the work’s expression is humor, rage, psychedelic maximalism or meditative transcendentalism, the force and goal that drives it is collective liberty. The breadth of their work encompasses both an antagonizing and joyful irreverence for late capitalist culture, and a sincere and persistent reverence for the sublime. Through immersive installations of projected video, sound and sculpture, they invite the participant to experience the body as the interface through which we connect to the earth, each other, and a cosmic interdimensionality. A desktop performance practice that pairs navigation of deep media archives with political discussions typed to the audience, is complemented by an intertwined social practice of advocating for access and equity and creating deep fellowship within community. They are one half of the tekno duo 404 NOT FOUND.
Bun Stout is an Indianapolis-born, Chicago-based artist. Their multidisciplinary artwork bridges physical and digital media to tell stories about imaginary futures and catalyze experiences of transformation. Mostly showing up in local nightlife, the bus there and back, and the bedrooms, bathrooms and stages of their collaborators, their practice synthesizes fashion, digital image-making and poetry to transform themself and collaborating artists into otherworldly storytellers with handmade augmented reality wearables.
Adrian Woods' remote sound performance installation invites people to experience telepresence through sound and text. Adrian Wood creates soundscapes, videos, transmissions, and live works that emerge from sonic collisions of identity and landscape. Adrian’s work centers the ear, drawing listeners in using sounds of water and wind, howls, whispers, seismic vibrations, and archival audio to explore invisible forces and histories that shape our social, ecological world.
In dreamgate, Blair St George Wright explores the sonic and cinematic wheelhouse of dreams; the origins and ends of life projected through the watercolor scrolls of their film works and bedsheet paintings. Blair (they/them) is a filmmaker, watercolor artist, and projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. With each new work, Blair draws threads from around the world to build intimate portraits of human experience. Consciousness, death, dreams, suffering, tenderness. They have featured 9 languages in their short film work thus far, screening in France, Brazil, and the USA (most recently, the Music Box Theatre). As a writer, Blair has collaborated in development with an Oscar-nominated short film producer, a Peabody-winning documentarian, an HBO producer, an honorary Oscar recipient and others. They are pursuing narrative film projects in and beyond Chicago.
Sara Sowell is an artist and filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. Her film, performance and installation work reanimates legacies of art and media production with irreverence through photographic abstraction and chance methods. Her work has shown in international festivals, artist-run spaces and galleries including Underscore, Milwaukee, WI; CROSSROADS, San Francisco, CA; The Nightingale, Chicago, IL; The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC; Baltic Analog Lab, Cēsis, LV; and The Film-makers’ Cooperative, New York. She currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Yiyi Liu is a new media artist primarily focused on computer graphics (CG). His works draw from the glitches and errors he has encountered in software, which have become his expressive vocabulary. His practice is informed by a grotesque aesthetic, which he employs to translate his observations and emotional experiences into digital scenes.
Ále Campos (b. Los Angeles, California) is a queer, Salvadorian-American multidisciplinary artist and performance maker currently based in Chicago, IL. They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022).Their work has been shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Jude Gallery, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman (Chicago, IL), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany). November 2022 marked their inaugural solo exhibition at Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO). They are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021). Last year, they were invited to exhibit in HPAC’s Ground Floor Biennial Exhibition, a survey of Chicago’s most promising emerging talent. They are currently a BOLT resident artist at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were most recently named a 2023 New City Art Breakout Artist in Chicago. This month their work is being exhibited in a group exhibition surveying work that uses technology as a means of healing, titled “MediaLive” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMOCA).