Centering on the use of domestic and recycled materials, this program of short films illuminates formal and cursory elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works presented—six shorts by Jodie Mack and “The Florestine Collection,” by Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas—question the role of decoration in daily life, and unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects. The program will feature a brief talk by Mack, whose artwork is featured in Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro. Mack will also take part in a post-screening Q&A moderated by Ekrem Serdar, Media Arts Curator for Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center.
Expanding upon notions of anti-animation set forth by experimental practitioners like Paul Sharits and Robert Breer, the films in this program apply formal principles of abstract cinema while pursuing an interest in found materials, evolving modes of production, and forms of labor. The works extend the temporal concerns of the Structural film, a simplified form of cinema that is driven by critical formalism rather than narrative content. By reflexively activating the referential properties of objects, the films refute abstraction, foregrounding questions of Romanticism surrounding metaphor and exchanging lyrical and mythopoeic modes for those of economic observation.
In Mack’s “Persian Pickles” (2012), a study of paisley patterns traces the motif from its origins in Persian weavings to appearances in Irish quilting and American counterculture. Her 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” (2012) and “Razzle Dazzle” (2014) employ handmade and machine-produced laces, tattings, and intricate weavings to meditate upon the industry of desire and the phenomenology of cinema.
Mack’s films are screened in concert with “The Florestine Collection” (2011), directed by Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas. After discovering more than a hundred handmade dresses in a trash pile during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Hill set out to make a film about the dressmaker, an elderly seamstress who had recently passed away. Hill’s husband, Paul Gailiunas, completed the film after Hill’s death.
https://madmuseum.org/events/posthaste-perennial-patterns-talk-and-screening-jodie-mack
