MANCHESTER.- HOME is presenting Wot u :-) about?, a major solo exhibition of new work, curated by Bren O’Callaghan, Visual Art Programme Manager, HOME, and Sarah Perks, Artistic Director: Visual Art, HOME.
Maclean’s highly distinctive visual output uses the fairytale genre to examine the contentious boundary between child and adult, touching upon ideas of commodified happiness and the politics of fear, rendering dark and unsettling narratives in the supersaturated, candy-coloured aesthetic of children’s television.
Centred on narratives established in three new video works, functioning as a series and featuring recurrent dialogue and motifs, Wot u :-) about? expands upon themes explored in Maclean’s previous works including Over The Rainbow (2013, illustrated above right) and Feed Me (2015). Pushing an exploration of language, the artist uses English neologisms, text speak and market research copy and gobbledegook to establish an only just comprehensible, yet otherworldly communication system. Cyclical and repeated dialogue, constantly shifting meaning and context, leave narratives severed and unresolved, and the continuous moving of genres between fairytale, musical theatre, television and horror communicate a manic and darkly comic take on themes of consumption, ‘happiness marketing’ and childhood.
Maclean uses computer technology and green-screen to generate locations, and borrows audio from television and cinema to construct narratives with comedic touch. Starring as children, adults and invented creatures, characters include a little girl, fairy tale witch and grotesquely smiling bambi-eyed mascot, merging flesh and blood bodies with 2D cartoon figures, creating unsettling surface gloss avatars who adopt a schizophrenic range of voices and emotions.
Maclean commented: “I’m interested in experimenting with how these films will function within the gallery space as large-scale projections, at times syncing and seeming to communicate with one another, and at other times branching off and seeming to develop their own self-enclosed narrative.”
Alongside the video works, Wot u :-) about? presents an array of larger-than-life figurative sculptures inhabiting the space, directly relating to and overlapping with the props, costumes and aesthetic within the films. Resembling hybrids of bored commuters, cutesy kids’ TV monsters and sickeningly engorged, over-consumptive organs, the figures also function as inanimate viewers for a series of infographic videos, displaying spreadsheets, bar graphs and market research surveys to their unblinking users. Riffing upon the commodification of youth and the pap-rhetoric of happiness marketing, they take the form of part playground-equipment, part-Pietà-like statuary, that upon closer inspection are being eaten alive by swarms of razor-toothed dolls. Maclean’s sculptural installations represent a fresh approach for the artist as she steps through the looking glass, to club, capture and drag back large-scale physical artefacts from her subversive CGI vistas.
Bren O’Callaghan commented: "I took out an Own Art loan to buy one of Rachel’s prints from Edinburgh Printmakers a few years back and remember thinking I’d love to work with the artist in any capacity - her output is akin to a burst sewer pipe in a rainbow factory; horrifying, beautiful, a tongue-lolling double scream-and-gulp. To be co-curating this exhibition of all new work here at HOME is literally a dream come true - albeit one of those dreams where the last image beneath your eyelids is of a small child advancing with a concealed weapon.”
Sarah Perks commented: “Rachel Maclean is absolutely at the forefront of our main specialism of artist film, and one of the most exciting UK artists working in this field right now. However - like us - she can see far beyond the screen, incorporating sculpture and other formats in her work and totally having something to say about the state of the world we are in right now.”
