Spectacle Theater and Disassociative Productions proudly present “Disassociating with M. Woods”, showcasing the avant-garde practice of one of the most radical underground filmmakers working today.
This special two day event features an in-person screening of Woods’ fourth feature film, Commodity Trading: Dies Irae (8/8 at 7:30PM) and a retrospective of selected short works (8/9 at 7:30PM). M. Woods will lead a post-screening discussion following both programs, emphasizing the construction of avant-garde art communities against the centrifugal force of fascistic nihilism.
[ WEBSITE LINK: https://www.spectacletheater.com/disassociating-with-m-woods/ ]
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. All screenings occur at Spectacle Theater, 124 S 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – 7:30 PM ($10 w/ filmmaker in-person)
more dates coming soon!
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.
“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
https://pools.events/event/OrPEg4tF/commodity-trading-dies-irae-w-qa/
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.
https://pools.events/event/BwVQTlNT/an-evening-with-m-woods/
Spectacle (est. 2010) is a collectively-run screening space in Brooklyn, NY, established and staffed by hard-working, cinema-loving volunteers. Our programming runs seven days a week and includes overlooked works, offbeat gems, contemporary art, radical polemics, live performance and more.
M. Woods (He/Him/They/Them) is a multidisciplinary artist implementing avant-garde strategies under the studio name “Disassociative Productions”. M is a first-generation US citizen, born to a Costa-Rican/Ecuadorian mother. M uses immersive time-based spectacle and constructed trances to navigate the internalized socio-political topographies of addiction, mental and physical disability, malignant nihilism, and white supremacy. M’s work deconstructs the post-911 acceleration of hyperrealism and (media)drug dependency, documenting the spread of solipsism in a media environment dominated by corporate neo-fascism.