For the month of August, Jupiter took over The Shelf at Maximillian William.

Jupiter is a Chicago-based magazine, programming platform, and film production company committed to cultivating a home for bold, experimental, and genre-defying discourse around contemporary arts and culture. Including a collection of texts culled from Editor-in-Chief Camille Bacon’s personal library, transformed here into what she calls a “three-dimensional annotated bibliography,” alongside four episodes of Jupiter’s recently released film criticism vertical, Jupiter Goes To The Movies, their installation at The Shelf takes cinema as its center of gravity. 

The formal inspiration for the “three-dimensional annotated bibliography” is drawn from Jupiter’s inaugural print publication: a zine created to accompany their debut short-film ‘It’s Just a Fucking Opening’ (dir. josh brainin and Youssef Boucetta). Featuring contributions by Bridgett M. Davis, Maya Cade, Amandine Nana, Legacy Russell, and Olukemi Lijadu, the zine also includes an annotated bibliography that denotes Camille, josh, and Youssef’s respective relationships to the array of references and lineages they held close in composing the film. Enamored by how an annotated bibliography can trace the anatomy of curiosity, materialize a genealogy of thought, and address the sentimental nature of study, Camille applies this same form — off the page and, instead, in a physical or “three-dimensional” context — to reflect upon the deepening of Jupiter’s engagement with film.

Additionally, a screen has been installed for the first time at The Shelf to display Jupiter Goes To The Movies. Activated by a core premise of bell hooks’ seminal book, reel to real: race, sex and class at the movies, wherein she writes “as a critic who has always worked to address audiences inside and outside the academy, I recognized that oral critical discussions of films took place everywhere in everyday life,” each episodedocuments a cadre of Chicago-based critics, artists, and curators as they traverse the city and think together in real time about BLKNWS (2025) by Kahlil Joseph, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Siméon (1992) by Euzhan Palcy, and Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins. In recording “oral critical discussions of films” that occur in the context of “everyday life” Jupiter seeks to bend the form of film criticism into a shape that honors the polyvocal oral traditions innate to the production and proliferation of Black culture. Additionally, while the majority of criticism that appears on the page is attributed to a singular author, Jupiter Goes to the Movies attunes itself to the chorus by employing handheld video footage to chronicle the riffs and instinctual interpretations that, like oral histories, are so seldom archived, thus animating the central provocation of this pursuit: if indeed the page struggles to accommodate the chorus, perhaps the screen lets it sing.