Hope Refuse (2024)

Hope Refuse is an exhibition that employs artificial intelligence to conjure critiques of how digital technologies shape activism and queer identities. MacCormack’s colourful and sardonic AI-generated printed images and videos bely the deep trauma and embodied grief inflicted by a broad range of interconnected, urgent issues from mental illness, self-medication, and criminalization, to social media, neoliberal capitalist exploitation, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The Orca Whale Drag series glamourizes the ‘resistance movement’ of orca whales sinking yachts to consider the environmental impacts of the ultrarich.The cartoonish détournement queers this resistance by transforming the formalwear-coded orcas into campy drag monsters as expressions of the ongoing horrors and anxieties of oppression. In this series, MacCormack aims to subvert AI biases  through the grotesque, the abject and the uncanny as a means to simultaneously unveil and obfuscate the uncomfortable disembodiment of dissociation.

The show integrates AI-generated imagery and video with sculptural elements, unsettling the intersection of art and technology, inviting viewers to engage with these critical reflections.

Special thanks to Jordan Arseneault, Genevieve Dionne and Ben Skinner for helping make this happen.