“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.

This project premiered during the opening reception of the 36th Onion City Film Festival on April 9th, 2026. Both the opening reception at 150 Media Stream and the opening night screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center were guest curated by artist Peter Burr.

Originally a virtual-reality work that premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, Ito Meikyū develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (the Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated, and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs, and calligraphy. Presented at 150 Media Stream in a new adaptation for the media wall, as well as in the original VR format during the festival.

Learn more about the collaboration with Onion City Film Festival here.