November 7, 2025 – January 31, 2026
Opening Friday, November 7, 6-9pm
Opening Week Program: Screening and Conversation l Sunday, November 9, 3-5pm

JOAN presents The Goal of Our Health, a solo exhibition by Alexis Kyle Mitchell, a New York and Glasgow–based artist and filmmaker. The exhibition marks the Los Angeles premiere of Mitchell’s 2024 feature-length film The Treasury of Human Inheritance and features newly commissioned works including an expanding series of short, silent films, sculptural and archival elements, and public programming. Mitchell’s practice unfolds across experimental film, installation, and performance, drawing bodies, histories, and social systems into tactile, immersive explorations. Her work interweaves themes of disability, memory, and kinship, inviting collective reflection through material and embodied experience.

Together, these works at JOAN form The Goal of Our Health, an expansive project that questions how ideals of health, movement, and ability shape science, technology, and the body—often in ways still haunted by the legacies of eugenics-based thinking and practice. Mitchell’s process is collaborative and embodied, drawing from archival research, community workshops, personal relationships, and non-toxic analog film practices.

At the center of the exhibition is The Treasury of Human Inheritance, a 60-minute 16mm film hand-processed with bodily materials such as urine and blood, which shape the texture and development of the film’s physical celluloid. Intimate and visceral, the film explores the entanglements of intergenerational illness, genetic inheritance, and ritual. Enveloped in an analog synthesizer score by longtime UK collaborators Richy Carey and Luke Fowler, it draws viewers into a sensorial space where these themes come alive.

Drawing from her family’s experience with Myotonic Dystrophy—a degenerative neuromuscular disease that intensifies with each generation—Mitchell reframes illness as both metaphor and material. The film’s physicality is inseparable from its themes of architectural decay, eugenics, and the science of heredity. By setting the intergenerational transmission of care against the degenerative effects of illness, Mitchell reminds us that history is not merely something we move through; it moves through us.

Installed alongside the film is Plates (2025), a series of short, hand-cranked 16mm screen tests developed with coffee and other organic materials. These works reconstruct historical depictions of the “ideal” body, drawn from a 1920s German gymnastics manual—specifically, a photographic publication by German gymnast and naturalist Dora Menzler that captured bodies in choreographed motion. The exhibition’s title is drawn directly from Menzler’s study, hauntingly linking past and present through gesture and form. In Plates, Mitchell restages Menzler’s poses, each held for the duration of a single hand-crank of the camera, evoking both the physical strain of performance and the slow, deliberate pace of analog filmmaking. These works also deepen Mitchell’s ongoing dialogue with Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographic explorations—especially his lesser-known images of disabled bodies in motion—reimagined here as analogue contact prints, scanned and transformed into textiles that move through the installation space.

Through these durational gestures and embodied techniques, the installation surfaces questions of repetition, representation, and the politics inscribed on and through the body. The material processing itself folds questions of labor, productivity, and extraction into the very fabric of the image, entangling histories, process and politics through every layer. Here, the laboring, vulnerable body becomes not only visible but materially present—etched into the film itself through substances like blood and coffee, blurring the line between bodily matter and cinematic form.

Upcoming Programming
On Sunday, November 9, from 3 to 5pm, there will be a screening of The Treasury of Human Inheritance, followed by a conversation with Alexis Kyle Mitchell, JOAN director and project curator Suzy Halajian, and Amanda Cachia, crip art historian and curator in the School of Art at Arizona State University. More information on additional programs and collaborations will be announced soon.

This project is part of JOAN’s second Chapter of programming (April 2024–January 2026), which gathers artists and collectives exploring communal structures of intervention and support as living experiments toward liberatory futures.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist whose work critically engages with feminist and disability studies, exploring how embodied knowledge challenges dominant narratives around health and identity. Exhibitions include Peer Gallery, London; Glasgow International, Glasgow; GTA24 MOCA Triennial, Toronto; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Kunstverein Munich; and Mercer Union, Toronto; screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam; Art of the Real, New York; and IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon; performances at MOCAToronto; University of Toronto and the New School, New York. Residencies include Cove Park (Scotland); MacDowell (USA); Sommerakademie Paul Klee (Switzerland); and Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). Mitchell was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University in the Center for Disability Studies and is currently a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.