Jodie Mack

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

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

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

Flowers dance and transform in water, using strobe effects and superimposition. A meditation on life cycles through botanical animation, continuing Jodie Mack's material exploration.

Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, colour and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalogue of catalogues remembers a tactile economy.

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.

A study in foreground and background made with a video camera, a set of handmade filters, and a canoe.

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

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.

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

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

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 flurry of security envelopes casts spells on the screen.

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

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

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

'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.