Rachel Maclean's motley mass media mashup
08 March 2024
When thumbing through the festival catalogue, it’s hard not to find your eyes drawn to images of Rachel Maclean’s work. They’re so saturated they almost vibrate, populated with big-eyed children and fuzzy critters in frilly frocks, they draw you into their world of delectable digital references. It would then seem strange that these two programmes require a bit of content warning, as they traverse some of the darkest iterations of contemporary culture, all wrapped in a pretty pink bow. But these extreme contrasts of light and dark, cute and grotesque, sweet and violent are where Maclean’s work acquires its unique frequency and develops a language all its own.
Within the Focus programme, we have selected works from throughout her career, and certain enduring themes and techniques become apparent from the very beginning. Already in Hit Me Baby (2007), we see Maclean exploring the possibilities of green screen, allowing her to build worlds that are both familiar and strange, and to play all of the characters within these worlds – an aesthetic style she continues to explore up until her latest work, with few exceptions such as upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop (2021) which is fully animated. Hit Me Baby is also an invitation to begin journeying with her through the bowels of popular culture (in this case, the rise and fall of Brittney Spears in the mid-aughts), taking on a cannibalistic approach to the nonsense signs and signifiers that swim relentlessly around us, relayed through a collage of found sound.
2012’s The Lion and The Unicorn sees this style take a more directly political turn with an extremely prescient take on the ambivalent bond between Scotland and England. Here we also see an unusual setting for Maclean, that is, a remarkably real world, and while that style remains an outlier in her work, the film does capture the shift in character development that will stay with her for many years: extremely elaborate costumes and makeup that take on a surrealist tone. Over The Rainbow (2013) returns us to a green screen world and further develops Maclean’s signature mise en scène and costume design into the hallucinogenic realm. The film departs from a clear focus or commentary (i.e. any one celebrity or political issue), but begins to pull at all sorts of loose threads within the popular milieu from singing competitions to Royal Family gossip. The end result is a soup of saccharine and sinister media mush that’s silently simmering inside all of us (with a generous sprinkle of Faust and the Brothers Grimm).
Food (albeit questionably salubrious) is an apt metaphor for what Maclean serves, as feeding and eating become a consistent theme. Present in all the works mentioned above, it is more literal in Germs (2013) where part of the film is an advertisement for yoghurt full of “happy bacteria” that wreak havoc on the protagonist. But it’s in Feed Me (2015) that Maclean begins to make clear that feeding is really about consuming in this mid-length, scripted story that has Maclean lip syncing to voice actors playing her most sinister characters of all. From child exploitation for commercial entertainment to sexual pleasure, the film explores our most craven cravings as a society, and feels once again extremely prophetic in our current post-Epstein context.
Feed Me also begins a discourse on cuteness that pairs perfectly with Dr Cute’s (2024) dissertation on the same subject, the latter attempting something rather linear and didactic for Maclean’s work, but still reliably unhinged and violent. Similar themes spring up in upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop (2021), but this work sees Maclean exploring entirely new techniques and aesthetics through 2D animation. This is the only film in either programme that doesn’t have her embodying every role, but in which the body is very much the central theme. Released peak YouTube, upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop follows a pretty young influencer grappling with self esteem issues and anxieties about ageing while the mirror she speaks into (the analogue black mirror) stokes her obsession with her youth and beauty, and takes liberties to “enhance” them. Though clearly rooted in the tropes of Disney princess animation, the film feels confrontationally contemporary, with nods to vlogging culture, plastic surgery and ecological devastation.
In her latest work, she jumps from animation to AI, with the World Premiere of DUCK (2024). In this case, the machine plays Rachel as Hollywood icons of yore are resurrected and superimposed on her body. Though duplicity and confounding codes appear in much of her work, here they are the main driver of the narrative, having Marilyn Monroe and Sean Connory face off in a ‘whodunnit?’ (but also a ‘what is it?’). The film indulges fabulously in its genre, full of all the sex and violence we come to expect in a spy thriller, but the phoniness and eerie artifice also keep the film turning endlessly inside out and on its head. It’s a clever take on a new technology pushed to its limits that is also an investigation into something as topical as ‘fake news’. But that is how one could describe a lot of Maclean's work.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the festival world has been slow to catch on to Maclean’s work, which has long been heralded in international art circles. It makes sense given that she has a background in painting and uses video as part of a larger studio practice that also includes digital paintings, sculpture and installation. Though part of our goal was to recontextualize her work in a cinema setting, we have also included an installation of DUCK as part of our Art Directions programme to allow audiences to experience it both ways. Also breaking beyond the boundaries of the screen is Maclean’s interactive VR work I'm Terribly Sorry (2018) – featured in our immersive media section – which gives you the opportunity to fully immerse yourself in her singular, unsettling and destructively digital world.
– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss