IMSS Artist-in-Residence

Fall 2020

Artist-in-Residence, Kioto Aoki

Kioto Aoki is a visual artist and educator using the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process to explore modes of perception as a politics of vision. Her photographic work oscillates between the still and the moving image, attentive to the apparatus of the human eye and the camera; while installation and artist book works engage mechanisms of structural tangibility and site-specificity. Forming a rhetoric of nuanced quietude, her practice considers the intimacies of vision through the experience of sight from inception through presentation. 

Kioto is also a musician, descending from an okiya (geisha house) performing arts family in Tokyo –Toyoakimoto– with roots dating back to the Edo period. Studying under her Tokyo-born father, Kioto is carrying on the artistic family lineage in Chicago, playing in both traditional and contemporary musical contexts. She specializes in Japanese traditional music, playing taiko, tsuzumi, and shamisen and has been performing professionally since age 7. Kioto is active within the experimental and creative music communities in Chicago and the Bay Area and leads Tsukasa Taiko, the Japanese drumming department at Asian Improv aRts Midwest. 

Image from series Acuities
2019 ongoing
gelatin silver print
Series for which the photographic methodology is governed by the inherent mechanism of the 4×5 field camera. During the actual moment of image-taking, film is placed between the lens and the ground glass, obstructing the view of the compositional frame. Using my hands to activate the landscape at this particular moment of limited visibility, the result is a series of aleatory compositions. The notion of visual acuity is redefined through the conceptual framework of hand-eye coordination.

Image from series Acuities
2019 ongoing
gelatin silver print

She has exhibited in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Musical projects include Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING, Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, The Reduction Ensemble, and the Taiko Legacy / Reduction series at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kioto is also a multi-year Ethnic and Folk Arts Master Apprentice Program Awardee from the Illinois Arts Council. Curatorial projects include the ongoing Chicago Obihiro Exchange Project, an initiative to cultivate international dialogue between contemporary artists from the Tokachi Region in Japan and Chicago. 

Artist-in-Residence, Kioto Aoki

My work is all about the body and the relationship between my body and the lens. It hinges as much on the physical process as it does the visual composition. As photographer and filmmaker, I often engage the visual plane with my hands and feet. As maker, I am interested in the self-sufficient cycle of the artist being simultaneously in front of and behind the lens. The body is also as a mechanism for which the viewer can access my work. The hand is my hand but also your hand and all of humankind’s hand; as is the foot. The dancing figure is my body but it could be anyone else moving just the same.

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Before pursuing the arts, I very seriously considered radiography or orthopedics as a career. I was frequenting doctor’s offices, MRIs, x-rays and CT scan appointments. I always felt I could use my intrinsically developed physical knowledge and interest through gymnastics in the future. Although I did not end up pursuing a medical career, my interest and connection to the body has never ceased. The potential to be able to connect these access points and make new work is very exciting.

Kioto Aoki, Residency Statement of Intent

Artist Statement

As a photographer and filmmaker, my work explores the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process to explore different modes of perception. Accentuating the nuances of time, space, form, light and movement, my practice calls for a return to the fundamental. A return to an awareness of our surroundings as a politics of vision. As humans we feel light, experience space, see form, sense time and understand movement and it all exists within the mundane. My work embraces this universality of the mundane, through the idiosyncrasies of conceptual photography and experimental cinema.

Learn more about the artist at https://kiotoaoki.com/

About the Residency Program: As artistic practice occupies an increasingly pluralistic field, The International Museum of Surgical Science believes that artists are uniquely equipped to extrapolate on Museum collections in innovative ways and introduce novel perspectives to the institutional depiction of medical history. The IMSS Artist Residency Program provides working artists with:

  • Access to the Museum’s extensive collections and archive
  • Visibility on the Museum’s website and social media channels
  • A month-long capstone Solo Exhibition (or equivalent presentation) at the Museum

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.