October 8th, 2014
@ Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz (map)
7:30pm
$10 (BUY TICKETS)
Experimental Response Cinema, in collaboration with the Blaffer Art Museum and the Aurora Picture Show, is excited to present the acclaimed program that’s touring the nation! Featuring a live performance by Jodie Mack of Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project!
“As far as arriving on a national scene, Jodie Mack must be considered 2013‘s breakout star of the avant-garde. With no less than five new works premiering this calendar year alone, the infectiously animated Mack makes films of equally enchanting, hand-crafted care. Combining elements 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.” – Jordan Cronk, Fandor
See also: A Dash of Whimsy, With Leftover Stars: Jodie Mack Plays With Posters in ‘Dusty Stacks of Mom’ (NY Times)
Program
“This collection of films investigates 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. Prodding at hierarchies of aesthetic value and the tension between high and low, these works question the role of abstract animation in a post-psychedelic climate. Merch tables meet museum gift stores. The sublime meets Sublime the band. Rippling head shop tie dyes and dollar store gift bags form ebullient spectacles from resurrected dead capital and banal everyday objects. These stroboscopic eulogies – celebrating the spectrum of abstraction from transcendent visual experiences to science kit optical fascinations – force a proscenium collision of the arena rock show, the planetarium light performance, and the cinema.” – Jodie Mack
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.)
Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project TRAILER from Jodie Mack on Vimeo.
Bio
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.
This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office/Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com
BLAFFER ART MUSEUM furthers the understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, publications, and public programs of merit and distinction. As the GATEWAY between the University of Houston and the City of Houston, Blaffer Art Museum is a CATALYST for creative innovation, experimentation, and scholarship. Its exhibitions and programs are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, create community through dialogue and participation and inspire an appreciation for the visual arts as a VITAL FORCE in shaping contemporary culture.
Aurora Picture Show (Houston, TX) is a non-profit media arts center that presents artist-made, non-commercial film and video. We are dedicated to expanding the cinematic experience and promoting the understanding and appreciation of moving image art.