Jodie Mack

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 kinetic journey through the graphic motifs of textiles paired with figures and landscapes to explore the technological development of fabric production and consumption alongside systems of visual and spoken language. The piece investigates recurring graphic symbols and how their cross-cultural appropriation functions within a global economy.

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.

Animated photo-negatives illustrate a WWII tragedy.

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

The interconnected circuitry. The aggregated flora. Alternating currents of the visual field.

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 kinetic journey through the graphic motifs of textiles paired with figures and landscapes to explore the technological development of fabric production and consumption alongside systems of visual and spoken language. The piece investigates recurring graphic symbols and how their cross-cultural appropriation functions within a global economy.

A kinetic journey through the graphic motifs of textiles paired with figures and landscapes to explore the technological development of fabric production and consumption alongside systems of visual and spoken language. The piece investigates recurring graphic symbols and how their cross-cultural appropriation functions within a global economy.

Animated photo-negatives illustrate a WWII tragedy.

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

The interconnected circuitry. The aggregated flora. Alternating currents of the visual field.

Discordant dysfunction down to the nitty griddy.

A stroboscopic dance party.

Everybody's watching.

Everybody's watching.

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.

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.

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

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

A flurry of security envelopes casts spells on the screen.

A flurry of security envelopes casts spells on the screen.

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

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 pattern parade followed by calm.

Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously-curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.

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

'Tie-dye' film study. Psychedelic patterns and colours mix on the various materials then explode onto the retina. The 16mm material perfectly captures the details of the materials.

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.

A musical that explores, in glorious color and song, the simultaneous disillusionment and hope of eternal love in the face of an economic crisis.

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

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

Hollis Frampton's T-Shirt Collection - animated!

Broken-hearted and mashed up.

Broken-hearted and mashed up.

The lyrics are from the musical "Finian's Rainbow," the carpets of color from Jodie Mack's inspired imagination. As with forebears like Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger, Mack's frame-by-frame animation translates line, texture and rhythm into pure kinetic energy. - Max Goldberg

Junk mail detritus forms a handicraft salute to new media.

Junk mail detritus forms a handicraft salute to new media.

A choreographed motion study for twinkling trinkets, beaming baubles, and glaring glimmers. A bow ballet ablaze (for bedazzled buoyant bijoux brought up to boil).

Shapes shake nervously. Lines sway back and forth. The sun sets.

Eye candy as a special treat. Let Your Light Shine is the ultimate Spectrum Short film, a photokinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. A work in the tradition of the absolute animation film of the 1930s, which requires prismatic glasses to achieve the maximum result.

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.

The third film in Mack's Wasteland series, Moons, Sons observes the rapid thaw of natural forms.

A scanned and spinning document of roughly forty phenakistoscopes made from discarded cardboard. Complete with digital scan glitches and singing by Perry Como.

A quilted call and response. A battle of extreme extremes.

Named after a type of Belgian lace, this spectral study investigates intricate illusion and optical arrest.