This collection of films by Jodie Mack investigates the formal principles of abstract cinema while maturing an interest in found materials, evolving modes of production, forms of labor, and the role of decoration in daily life. Prodding at hierarchies of aesthetic value and the tension between high and low, these works question the role of abstract animation in a post-psychedelic climate.
Merch tables meet museum gift stores. The sublime meets Sublime the band. Rippling head shop tie dyes and dollar store gift bags form ebullient spectacles from resurrected dead capital and banal everyday objects. These stroboscopic eulogies – celebrating the spectrum of abstraction from transcendent visual experiences to science kit optical fascinations – force a proscenium collision of the arena rock show, the planetarium light performance, and the cinema.
Jodie Mack in person.
Programme:
- New Fancy Foils (12.5 m, 16mm, color, silent) Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, color, and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalog of catalogs remembers a tactile economy.
- Undertone Overture (10.5m, 16mm, color, sound) A study of tie dye swims out to the cosmos and back again.
- Dusty Stacks of Mom: the Poster Project (41m, 16mm, color, sound- LIVE PERFORMANCE) Interweaving the forms of personal filmmaking, abstract animation, and the rock opera, this animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business; the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in commerce; and the division (or lack of) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch. Using alternate lyrics as voice over narration, the piece adopts the form of a popular rock album reinterpreted as a cine-performance.
- Glistening Thrills (8m, 16mm, color, sound) A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.
- Let Your Light Shine (3m, 16mm, color and b/w, sound; requires prismatic glasses) The ultimate photo-kinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles.
