PLASMA presents Jodie Mack March 11, 2019

March 11, 2019 @ 6:00pm , Center for the Arts 112, University at Buffalo

The Department of Media Study’s PLASMA Series Presents a screening and discussion with:

JODIE MACK

Intro by Professor Laura Kraning

POSTHASTE PERENNIAL PATTERNS

Expanding upon notions of anti-animation set forth by experimental practitioners like Paul Sharits and Robert Breer, the studies in this program apply formal principles of abstract cinema while pursuing an interest in found materials, evolving modes of production, and forms of labor. Questioning the role of decoration in daily life, the films extend the temporal concerns of the structural film while calling for a critical formalism. These films refute abstraction by reflexively activating the referential properties of objects, foregrounding questions of Romanticism surrounding metaphor and exchanging lyrical and mythopoeic modes for those of economic observation. In Persian Pickles, a swimming study of paisley patterns traces this motif from its origins in Persian weavings to appearances in Irish quilting and American counterculture. The ongoing Blanket Statement series uses quilts to evoke issues of domestic security, citing appearances of quilts in the fine arts from Michelangelo Pistoletto to Beryl Korot. Point de Gaze and Razzle Dazzle feature handmade and machine-produced laces, tattings, and intricate weavings to meditate upon the industry of desire and the phenomenology of cinema. Finding utility within the ornamental, the works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.

About the artist:

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. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design.

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. She is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College and a 2018/19 Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University.