In the August hangover of America’s 250th birthday, an incision in our micro-cinema will open itself to the dense labyrinthine nothing that permeates its tendrils and suffocates the physical world above, infecting and hooking us to an infinite carousel of violence and self-serving detachment. This realm of lack is known to some as the Numb Spiral, a (non)place artist and filmmaker M. Woods has not only returned from, but has sought to map in their immersive —and often intermixed— body of film, photography, VR, and poetry.
Woods will visit Spectacle on Friday August 8th to act as both our tour guide and illicit media-pharmacist through the hallucinatory nightmare of despair and unrest of the first Trump presidency and COVID-19 pandemic, as depicted in their apocalyptic auto-biographical feature documentary COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE. For those brave enough to experience an unsupervised multi-media collage-induced trance, this essential primer in Numb Spiral spelunking will reoccur three more times throughout the month.
On Sunday August 9th, return for a second dose to witness the artist present/perform a series of short video and films works, connecting further nodes among the network of digital sickness.
COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE [NUMB SPIRAL 4]
Dir. M. Woods, 2022.
United States, 87 min.
STROBE WARNING. Scenes in this film contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.
TICKETS
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – 7:30 PM ($10 w/ filmmaker in-person)
more dates coming soon!
“The closest semblance of a plot is a man’s manic odyssey around Los Angeles, which culminates in a virtual reality experience at a Culver City mall. Woods conjures a sense of hyperreality by layering a barrage of effects—extreme fisheye, blurs, animation—to create images hat feel hyper-mediated. The film captures the fleeting thrills of digital life, mirroring the experience of someone feverishly doomscrolling through a TikTok feed full of bright colors and scenes of violence.”
—Lucia Ahrensdorf, Screen Slate
STROBE WARNING. Films in this program contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.
SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM ($10 w/ filmmaker in-person)
A prologue, epilogue, and appendix all at once for COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE, M. Woods returns with a doctor’s bag of disassociative-media booster shots. Direct animation, inter-media collage, appropriation, vitriolic poetry, cursed family travelogues, and music videos make up this hellish cocktail. Including works preceding and following the creation of Woods’ feature and riding along interrelated streams of consciousness, titles screened in this showcase have rarely (if ever) seen a NY audience –including a few cathartic rows against Spectacle’s reluctant home of modern day Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Works in this program may include, but are not limited to…
FOR DIES IRAE
Dir. M. Woods, 2017.
United States, 6 min.
“a floundering figure or form of nothing born and gasping before bludgeoned by the carpet, pulled swiftly and quickly out before the floor gets bolted down. Just torn flesh, not flesh, but fish flakes and canned meat.”
MELENCOLIA 1: THE END OF THE ALPHABET
2023. United States, 16 min.
“A sadness rolls over me as I gaze into the entrails of this pandora’s box and my shadow cranks a lost appendage for the sake of ontological tangents and bewitched spaces. I want you to witness The Hallucinatory Zone of Neo-Liberal death hounds and lost gazes that expand and contract time. I was nothing, so nothing was lost.”
METASTASIS
2018. United States, 5 min.
“How to have a good time living inside cancerous hypercube. No moving images, just images that appear to be moving. At the cellular level it’s really noisy now. Our resolution is defined by a finite grid. Dissolution of the family structure with a carnival get-down. A pretty lively ditty for a funeral dirge, don’t you think?”
MELENCOLIA 2: DESTITUTION SIGNS
2023. United States, 8 min.
“A nostalgic retread through the 4th plateau of New York City followed by a short polemic against ethnography and hipsters.”
DAILIES FROM DUMPLAND PART 3
2017. United States, 7 min.
“Columbus Circle spiraling down stacks of hell, a fucking urine-soaked bastard and his corporate media frenemies across the street. A deviation, following, touching “here” and craving an empty sex and cataclysmic disorder. Revolutions revolutions revolutions. Just saying, Columbus Circle ain’t far from Williamsburg, hipster youth.”
MELENCOLIA 3: SWEET ASSASSIN
2025. United States, 5 min.
A music video for Brood Faye.
I ONCE WAS LOST
2024. United States, 6 min.
MOCKINGBIRD
2026. United States, 6 min.
A music video for Chestnut.
BODY PROP – MOVEMENT 5 [free disassociating on the numb spiral]
2020. United States, 6 min.
TRT: approx. 65 min.