By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Ardent, Verdant, (Burning green) is a proper title for Jodie Mack’s latest exploration in the structural game of textures, patterns and colorful images that carry an unsuspected depth. This playful way in which Mack orders her personal structure of objects can be misleadingly deceitful, although in the best of ways: there’s always something to reflect on this intense game of materials which is the filmmakers way of speaking of the optical arrest that the everyday object can bring to life, and the underlying reflection on the origins of the same object and what does it speak for. From fabrics, to light-waves, to magazine collages, the cultural effect and structural eye-game on Jodie Mack’s works makes her one of the most interesting avant-garde filmmakers today.
Back to burning green. This new series, which Mack has entitled Wasteland, seems to be a work of the recycling of lifeless objects to infuse them with new meaning, bringing them to different contexts as a way of building new significants. The color green, in this case, is the main significant since it’s the color of the nature passages shown in her film, but also the color of old computer or electrical boards which are overlapped as a visual collage. Something is indeed connecting this two distant images, this artifact which seems to be the basis of circuitry (both electronic and life circuits), of connection, a material source that combines the possibilities of existence in two different realms. This “burning green” allows for the growth of technology, and the growth of nature, a paradoxical event in which the development of technology turns out to be the kick-starting point of this fact of working with trash as it was something precious. Circuitry is outdated, discarded and thrown away, being rescued by the filmmaker in order to create a new loop of ideas: the thing that destroys also creates.
There’s a lot of pivotal ideas happening inside Jodie Mack’s latest film, all of which relate to the structure of the visual presentation, this theme of visual passage that is repeated throughout her work and has become her trademark way of doing experimental work. In Ardent, Verdant, we are subjected to the recovery of the discarded as a reflection of a state. What does this says to us about our personal environment, about what surrounds us? Mack’s work is fantastic food for thought, a carefully crafted way of work with the visual to construct provoking ideas.
Wavelengths 1: Appetite for Destruction
Director: Jodie Mack
USA · 2017
5′