DUSTY STACKS OF MOM: THE POSTER PROJECT

Presented in collaboration with McIntosh Gallery, this screening features a selection of New Hampshire-based artist Jodie Mack’s quirky and colourful hybrid-animations, inviting audiences to partake in her stunningly vibrant visual experiments. The centrepiece of the programme is a whimsical stop-motion animated rock opera performed by the artist.

PROGRAM

POSTHASTE PERENNIAL PATTERN
2010 | 4min | sound | 16mm

Rapid-fire florals and morning bird songs bridge interior and exterior, design and nature.

GLISTENING THRILLS
2013 | 8min | sound | 16mm

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
2013 | 3min | sound | 16mm

A spectacle for prismatic spectacles. Handmade optical polyrhythms and a thousand rainbows explore the grating equation.

DUSTY STACKS OF MOM: THE POSTER PROJECT
2013 | 41min | sound | 16mm

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.

Artist Bio

JODIE MACK is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.

Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.

Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others.

Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2014 "25 New Faces to Watch" and one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' YBCA 100 in 2015, she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. She is a 2017/18 Film Study Center Fellow and Roberta and David Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.