Times Square Will Showcase Midnight Moment With Jodie Mack

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is proud to collaborate with Times Square Arts and the Times Square Advertising Coalition on the September 2018 iteration of Midnight Moment, the world's largest and longest-running digital art exhibition. Nightly throughout September, from 11:57 pm to midnight, electronic billboards in Times Square will feature Jodie Mack's Posthaste Perennial Pattern, which fuses synthetic floral fabrics in a stop-motion animation that pulsates as if capturing a garden in the moment of bloom.

Posthaste Perennial Pattern is presented in relation to MAD's exhibition Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro,on view at the Museum through September 9, 2018. The exhibition presents works by feminist artist Miriam Schapiro alongside works by nine contemporary artists, including Jodie Mack, who explore pattern and ornamentation as a language of abstraction tied to the personal and the political.

An experimental animator, Mack creates handmade 16mm films that combine the formal techniques and structures of abstract, absolute animation with those of cinematic genres. Frequently made with collaged domestic materials, her work explores the relationship between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced, decorative imagery. Mack recycles and revives found materials from everyday life, and the stroboscopic effect in her animation imparts a kinetic energy to things we may otherwise deem banal. By embracing ornamental patterns and materials like textiles, costume jewelry, and construction paper, Mack engages with a larger reframing of art history to include artistic modes such as craft and folk art, which were historically marginalized due to their associations with femininity, domesticity, or utility.

In her fabric flicker films, Mack playfully subverts the association of various textiles with stable, quiet household settings and furniture through a frenzied presentation of patterns. The interplay between the imagined passive domestic interiors that the patterns were intended to decorate, the graphic, two-dimensional illustration of organic matter, and the technologically imposed chaos becomes further amplified on the electronic billboards of Times Square.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum's curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design.

Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity. Generous support of Times Square Arts is provided by ArtPlace America and ArtWorks. Visit TSq.org/Arts for more information.