Look What the Clown Dragged In

THIS Gallery 2025

 

Look What theClown Dragged In is an installation of AI generated images and videos, mixed with cardboard and text that form unhinged narratives about self and Other. Continuing in their exploration of the ways the digital world shapes and defines us and our politics, MacCormack AKA Dissociative Dreams, calls us to look upon the  mess we’ve made of our inner lives and the remnants of our interiority. With dark humour and aesthetically poignant cues of traumatization, the artist illuminates the site-specificity of our own bodies (tethered to smart phones, social media, memory) and the neoliberal capitalist scaffolding that holds them in place. In Vancouver this otherscape is further compounded by a violent class divide, lack of housing and the fentanyl crisis.

“Masks used in drama or playthings have held a certain primeval baroque quality, they are that false face floating atop/strapped to the real one, so their representation in Western visual art tends to toe the line of good taste, and hence, of a morality. Masks function in this series as supralinguistic shields, like the drag queen who lipsyncs in lieu of singing. Like shields, masks are objects upon which immobile tragedies are written in often contradictory semiotics (think of the ancient Greek tragic persona or Chappell Roan’s makeup). The make-up applied to masks, in a semi-illusory theatrical/banquet-hall dark backdrop in MacCormack’s latest series, conjures questions about constituent parts (like genitalia or secondary sex characteristics), about the dream-self as distinct from the idealized self and akin to the performative self. I see haunted selves in silent cameos condemning the essentialism of portraiture that says too much, each fictional person is a real self, perhaps, in a Cindy Sherman ironic way, but faker and more authentic. “Say less,” but the laugh track there, the tears always already painted on in backstage borrowed ink.”  – Jordan Arseneault