Hope Refuse: An installation by
@JessMacAI
-Venue: August Studios, 1320 E Pender St, Vancouver, BC V5L
-Opening Reception: Friday, January 12, 2024, 6 pm - 10 pm
-Exhibition Hours: Saturday, January 13 - Sunday, January 14, 11 am - 5 pm
-Additional Viewing by Appointment: Until January 21
Hope Refuse is an exhibition that employs artificial intelligence to conjure critiques of how digital technologies shape activism and queer identities. MacCormack’s colorful and sardonic AI-generated printed images and videos by 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 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 and inviting viewers to engage with these critical reflections.
Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist working in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Jess’ animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, Inside Out Film and Video Festival (Toronto) and Mix Brazil Film Festival of Sexual Diversity (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, BR). Their interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Academie der Künst der Welte (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), Western Front (Vancouver), articule (Montreal) and many other local and international galleries.
They have an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University (2008) and were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010-2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art Design and is working towards their PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.