Jodie Mack (b. 1983) 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 is the 2013 recipient of the Marion McMahan Award at the Images Festival.

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