Chapter Three

Jo Dery’s wildly inventive animated films explore and push at the techniques and boundaries of animation. Dery uses everything from collage, illustration, digital manipulation, photomontage, puppetry, and printmaking to tell short, fantastical tales that often resonate with the tone of folklore and mythology. At the root of her stories is Dery’s own life and location, be it Providence, RI (where she co-founded the seminal feminist collective Dirt Palace) or Chicago, IL, her new home since the fall of 2011.

In her newest work, Chapter Three, Dery uses the effectively direct materials of pencil, ink, and paper to create an animation around the theme of chance – depicting an anthropomorphized snake, a play off the double-roll turn of the dice called “snake eyes.” Dery’s video is transposed into an installation of books in the round, each book an artifact of the animating process, and a reference to the Museum’s DeNormandie Library as the keeper of stories and histories of art.

Bookbinding by Deb Dormody.