Jacky Connolly
2021Hudson Valley Ruins
Jacky Connolly
Depicting various domestic spheres of a suburban north American context, Hudson Valley Ruins is a machinima video that relies on The Sims 3 computer graphics engine to depict the absurd, alienated, and often uncanny lives of several characters, focusing on two young girls and their visions, experiences, and fantasies.
Hudson Valley Ruins
Anhedonia
Jacky Connolly
Anhedonia (2017) – a machinima film in six parts. Jacky Connolly turns her filmmaking practice towards a mysterious group home in the virtual American South. Several avatars live in three small buildings near the town's railroad yard, where their lives are punctuated by hours spent in front of a screen. Images from elsewhere begin to intrude with mounting intensity, as the boundaries of the film are fractured by the characters’ visual and auditory hallucinations. These moments of psychosis give insight into the characters’ shared histories, as well as the dissociative atmosphere of their cultural landscape.
Anhedonia
Ariadne
Jacky Connolly
The fifty-minute piece is set amidst a lightning storm which splices together two realities: a virtual, seaside Italian villa created in Sims, and New York City, shot with a camera. The rupture forms a third suburban, autumnal realm. Ariadne1, of New York and played by the artist, decides she wants to disappear, allowing lightning to transport her into a virtual realm. The simulated Ariadne2 is seen with a red lightning scar upon her chest—a trace of the act, which she carries with her back into the live-action scene that concludes the film.
Ariadne
