Jodie Mack

A university has found the leg bone of Amelia Earhart. A high school science teacher travels to the underworld to bring back his girlfriend. Animals are organizing into concentric circles and helium has escaped into the luminiferous aether.

A summing up of the spontaneous Super 8 filmmaking I have done over the past decade exploring nature, home, and friends using improvised distorting lenses, macro photography, and pixillation. I imagine that it would fit the film scholar P. Adams Sitney's definition of a " Quotidian Lyric". Music by 2 of my favorite percussion ensembles : Ensemble et. al. and TIGUE.

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.

Animated photo-negatives illustrate a WWII tragedy.

A maximum cycle that celebrates mesmerizing computer graphics made for looping on a small, decoupaged monitor. Created for the "Post-Scarcity" show at 65GRAND Chicago in June, 2009.

A 2012 series of looped screensaver video art made by Jodie Mack

Discordant dysfunction down to the nitty griddy.

A flurry of security envelopes casts spells on the screen.

A flurry of security envelopes casts spells on the screen.

A pattern parade followed by calm.

A collaboration with Chicago’s Judson Claiborne that captures the desert hallucinations of David Morehouse, former CIA spy and author of Psychic Warriors.

A bite-sized star punch exercise in direct animation with colored acetate.

Filmmaker Jodie Mack’s video animated short is the cat’s pajamas. Literally. The London-born experimental animator’s overlay of recycled everyday patterns and materials has a homey, patchwork quality well-suited to its just-barely-domesticated feline subjects. Its playful and eye-catching collage also offers us the chance to consider the relationship between fine-art sensibilities and the castoff items of mass-market design. – Robert Avila

A stroboscopic dance party.

Colors and bubbles bustle energetically via oil, ink and clear acetate.

A swimming study of paisley patterns traces this decorative motif from its origins in Persian weavings to appearances Irish quilting and American Counterculture. Extending on the stroboscopic tradition of anti-animation, this short material study fixates upon discarded materials to examine the decorative and its relationship to the cycles of industry and evolving modes of production. - Jodie Mack

Direct animation with stained-glass contact paper, ink, and acetate.

Ultraviolet culminates a body of work (collage, animation, and pre-cinematic optical toys) that glows under blacklight, uniting my previous work in posters and textiles with my ongoing sublimation of art and craft. Somewhere between psychedelic posters and neon-stained glass windows, each quilt mourns a loved one who experienced addiction before their death. The flat quilts and screens seek impossible comfort. The patterning of collages echo the [de]formation of habit, central to the experience of addiction, not just to substance but labor itself. The repetition of the circular discs (phenakistoscopes) and looping animations relapse on repeat. The still works provide the basis for “animation”: exuberant yet mournful in pace, animating life and also grief. From fluorescent rocks in Franklin, N.J., to the glow décor aesthetics of Party City, Ultraviolet is a collision of the real and replica, revealing the vast unseen complexities of the human experience, what is invisible to the sun.

Everybody's watching.

Everybody's watching.

A series of chromatic intersections. Audience members form teams who respond to vertical lines by shouting "plaid" and to horizontal lines by shouting "rad". This approximation of the sound was recorded at the Anthology Film Archives in February, 2011.

Tacky threads luminesce at a firefly’s pace, twinkling through remnants of chintzy opulence and gaudy glamour prestissimo brilliante.

Hollis Frampton's T-Shirt Collection - animated!

Junk mail detritus forms a handicraft salute to new media.

Junk mail detritus forms a handicraft salute to new media.

A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Mesmerising RGB bling-bling for the cinema, featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.

Made entirely by hand from cut marbled paper, this odyssey of remnants re-imagines a dream-sequence love.