Jess MacCormack
The Show Must Go On, 2024
Eclipse Portals, 2024
Another World, 2024
There is a new rising group of artists working with prompt and image to video tools that sharply explore the uncanny qualities of these AI generated images in unique, personal ways. Undoubtedly, Jess Mac stands out as one of the most fascinating among these artists.
Jess has been a multidisciplinary artist for over 25 years – their practice includes graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, video, GIF and community art – exploring queer politics, embodiment and criminalization. They have always been interested in the ways technology informs our identities and relationships. With AI generated images, Jess found an expansive realm for exploration.
As the collaboration with AI, at this stage, often results in unpredictable, surreal results, Jess believes that this allows for a queering of the imagery, undoing normative representations of gender, kinship and embodiment with ease; and simultaneously illustrating the dissociated affect inherent in both mediated relations and traumatized individuals.
Jess is also critical of the biases of image generating platforms and the ways in which these corporations define what is ideal or what is possible. So, according to them, this presents an opportunity to explore queerness and disability within a highly loaded context, which makes for a rich dialogue about contemporary society. The three video pieces selected for Provocation: Investigating Technology, continue these explorations. They are perfect examples of Jess’ unique ability of creating enticing and disquieting worlds inhabited by strange yet familiar beings.
Looking at these videos, it’s hard to say if the characters are smiling or screaming. The apparent cheerfulness of these colorful works only makes them more disturbing. The hybrid bodies, the shiny plastic-like skins, the odd viscous sounds, all elements are engaging while being profoundly unsettling. Pleasure, pain and fear seem to be also morphing together, along with the morphing shapes in the images.
It is within these unsettling realms that their work finds its potency and significance, urging us to confront the various shades of human experience we often prefer to overlook.
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Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Working with communities and individuals affected by stigma and oppression, MacCormack uses cultural platforms and distribution networks to facilitate collaborations which position art as a tool to engender personal and political agency. Working in various mediums – graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, video and community art – their work explores queer politics, embodiment and criminalization.
Jess Mac’s digital art has been shared through various online platforms, such as Artforum International, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, VICE Creator’s project, White Hot Contemporary Art, Bitch Magazine, PAPER Magazine and Art F City. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Inside Out, Imaginative Film Festival and International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). MacCormack’s interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Academie der Künste der Welte (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), articule (Montréal, Canada), Western Front (Vancouver, Canada) and many other local and international galleries.
They have an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University (2008) and were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010-2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is working towards their PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.