Let Your Light Shine
Filmmaker Jodie Mack in attendance
Co-presented with Blaffer On Screen
Tuesday, October 7, 7PM
Aurora Members Free (with RSVP), Non-members $10
Jodie Mack brings a collection of playful and thoughtful films that investigate the formal principles of abstract cinema while maturing an interest in found materials, evolving modes of production, forms of labor, and the role of decoration in daily life. "Considered [a] breakout star of the avant-garde (Fandor)," Mack's tactile work skirts the edges between animation, collage, autobiography and music video. On Tuesday, October 7 at 7PM, Mack will host "Let Your Light Shine," a program she describes as a "travel play variety roadshow" at Aurora Picture Show. The night includes an opening act of films, a rock show style live cinema headliner inspired by Pink Floyd, and concludes with a film encore showcasing a stroboscopic collection of 16mm.
The highlight of this program is Mack's live cinema performance of "Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project" (2013, 41 mins), an animated rock opera paying affectionate tribute to the demise of her mother's rock-and-roll merchandise business. Of the program Fandor describes, "Combining elements of analog animation, stop-motion miscellany, performance art physicality, and rock opera histrionics, the forty-five-minute 'Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project,' serenaded by Mack's live vocal re-imagining of Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon,' is not only the young filmmaker's most ambitious project to date, but also a monument to familial economics and a dizzying in-person A/V experience in its own right."
Special thanks to Experimental Response Cinema and the Blaffer Art Museum for their support of this program.
The following works are included in this program:
New Fancy Foils
12:30 min / 16mm / silent / 2013
Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, color, and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalog of catalogs remembers a tactile economy.
Undertone Overture
10:30 min / 16mm / sound / 2013
A study of tie dye swims out to the cosmos and back again.
Dusty Stacks of Mom: the Poster Project
41 min / 16mm / LIVE PERFORMANCE / 2013
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.
Glistening Thrills
8 min / 16mm / sound / 2013
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
3 min / 16mm / sound / 2013
The ultimate photo-kinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. (Requires prismatic glasses.)
ABOUT JODIE MACK
Jodie Mack (born 1983; London, UK) 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 and currently teaches animation at Dartmouth College. 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. Questioning the role of decoration in daily life, the works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Views From the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival. She has presented solo programs of her work at venues such as the Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, REDCAT, and the BFI London Film Festival. She has also worked as a curator and administrator with Dartmouth's EYEWASH: Experimental Films and Videos, Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Eye and Ear Clinic, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and The Nightingale. She was a featured artist at the 2011 Flaherty Seminar, and she's the 2013 recipient of the Marion McMahan Award at the Images Festival.
Additional works by Mack will be shown at the University of Houston’s College of Architecture Auditorium on Monday, October 6 at 7PM as part of Blaffer On Screen film and video series.
Members Only Behind the Screens Reception
With Filmmaker Jodie Mack
Tuesday, October 7, 6:00PM
Free for Aurora Members with RSVP