Kioto Aoki
Kioto Aoki is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, film, books and installations to engage the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Using the nuances of time, space, form, light and motion, her work explores different modes of perception as it relates to the space between the still and the moving image. Her work also explores the photographic and cinematic interpretations of the body in space and includes a series of dance-movement films. She has exhibited and screened in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Kioto received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a past artist in resident for HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Portrait by Devina Yoestong
Stories from Kioto Aoki
Kioto Aoki & Benito Juarez High School
Project Overview
Kioto Aoki & Benito Juarez High School
Kioto Aoki ends her tenure at Benito Juarez much like the way it begin : with movement, excitement, visions of the future.
Project Overview
Kioto Aoki, Jan Tichy & Benito Juarez Community Academy
- Jose Zavala – Animate in Place
- Alonzo Ulloa – Animate in Place
- Citlaly Carranza – Animate in Place
- Elizabeth Arriaga – Animate in Place
- Marvin Lopez – Animate in Place
- Nilsy Baltazar – Animate in Place
- Karen Aragon – Animate in Place
- Zitaly Luvios – Animate in Place
- Quesalis Carranza – Animate in Place
- Sarai Arellano – Animate in Place
Project Overview
Animate in Place builds on previous years of collaboration between Benito Juarez Community Academy and CPS Lives, incorporating analogue photographic processes into creative projects, and this year introducing elements of moving image. Students from the IB digital arts course began by looking at various optical toys developed in the 19th century, which reflect humanity’s long standing fascination with suggestive movement and can be traced back to prehistoric cave paintings. Linking their photographic studies with these early moving image techniques, the students were tasked to create their own short narratives as stop motion animations from home, photographing on their smartphones to animate the space and objects around them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has reached a moment of temporary stasis, with the home as its central axis. Thus students were encouraged to think about what it means to animate this space during the shelter-in-place measures, resulting in site-specific and situationally-specific narratives.
Jan Tichy, Kioto Aoki & Benito Juarez Community Academy
Project Overview
Places Under the Sun, 2018 Cyanotype on cotton, unique quilt, 66*36 inch
Following on the history of Chicago documentary projects that CPS Lives continues, students from the nearby Benito Juarez Community Academy were asked to make a snapshot of their place in the city, capturing with their smart phones cameras the world around their neighborhood, mostly Pilsen. Stacy Ciccone, IB digital art teacher at Benito Juarez Community Academy and Jan Tichy and Kioto Aoki have worked during the spring with two classes to include photography in the existing art program, introducing analog photographical processes into their digital photography. For the occasion of Bauhaus Centennial Kioto and Jan explored with CPS students the work of Nathan Lerner, the New Bauhaus Chicago artist and designer. The artists introduced the students to the work coming from the Chicago New Bauhaus, visiting AIC and seeing the origional work. Following the visit to AIC Photograpny colelction, the students build their own Lerner’s Light Boxes to experiment with light and space. Photographing with their own smart phone cameras and developing the images as cyanotypes, the students learned about digital and analog photography. The cyanotypes prints on cotton cloth allowed for the individual works to come together as one large quilt that decorates the halls of the school along the quilt from last year. In class the students processed the digital images they captured around their neighborhood into black and white negatives and printed on transparencies that later transferred as sun prints on cyanotype cloth. The quilt that they put together from these prints is a collaborative effort that reflects on some of the perspectives they see their neighborhoods through.
Kioto Aoki & Mark Sheridan Math and Science Academy
