CHILD MASK DEATH HOOD is an installation of a cardboard fort featuring a series of AI-generated portraits and videos that reflect a colourful yet nightmarish speculative universe. At once part animal and part clown, the melting faces and limbs reveal altered states of consciousness merging joy with horror. Many of the figures are in childlike scenes – a naive starry night, a snowy mountain top or a storybook rainbow. Created in Midjourney and Runway these images and videos offer an uncanny narrative of terrifying connections and chaotic beauty that reflect the artist’s own childhood trauma. With fragile figurines, puppets and mask motifs, the images render the many layers of identity that form around a real-life abusive leader or iteration thereof.
As a small child, dissociation was MacCormack’s only means of survival, but this left them with a fractured and hidden reality as an adult. Various inner ‘parts’ emerged to deal with ongoing sexual abuse, and over time this left them struggling with depression, anxiety, disembodiment and self-harm. These works portray the shards of self in an otherworldly, dark emotional landscape through a fairground palette of portraits, fragmented bodies and animal hybrid figures.
Mask motifs in the chiasmus CHILD MASK DEATH HOOD pieces highlight a search for self and authenticity when one has been forced to play various roles to survive; the desire to be seen and accepted, to be recognized as human when one’s humanity has been stripped away; to make certain intentional liberatory choices after decades of shame holding sway for too long. The polysemic nature of masks as protecting the identities of witness, and their use in play or carnival is a disjunctive tool akin to Nicholas De Villiers notion of queer opacity. These works also illustrate the strength and resilience of survival and how art can play a role in healing by making the invisible visible, or “unsecret”, a term synonymous with the uncanny, or unheimlich.
Queer and absurd, this work invites you into MacCormack’s multifarious, haptic, audacious, and quasi-magical imaginary world(s).
