In the animation How to Win Friends and Influence People, Jess Wheelock falls into Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book and is mentored by the author, who gives her some advice and tools to help her deal with people. Wheelock considers every part of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People as material for the animation: the words, the author, the physical object. She also sees herself – the reader – as a material. The project plays with the self-help genre by acting out Carnegie’s book. Is it OK not to be OK?

“I realize now that healthy people don’t write books about health. And, in the same way, people who have a natural gift for diplomacy don’t write books on How to Win Friends and Influence People. The reason I wrote the book was because I have blundered so often myself… .” — Dale Carnegie

Jess Wheelock is an artist living and working in Oakland, CA. Her work has been shown in internationally, including at the PDX Film Festival and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Jess received an MS from MIT and attended a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010.