Dystopian Hyper-Realities with Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean is increasingly establishing herself as one of the most influential and distinctive contemporary artists in the U.K, and after seeing her exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection in London, made it abundantly clear why. Her work of hyper-real worlds exaggerating and critiquing the current state of society, politics and digital media, is somewhat nightmare-ish, but also very familiar.
Rachel Maclean, Spite Your Face, 2017 (still). Commissioned by Scotland + Venice 2017
Drawing on fairy-tales and childhood TV programmes/film, Maclean’s film, Spite Your Face (2017) very clearly references the tale of Pinocchio – a boy whose nose grows after telling a lie, with a modern dystopian and political twist. The film is incredibly significant today as it responds to the ‘political climate in the UK and abroad during 2016-17 and in particular…the lead up to the Brexit vote and the US presidential election’ (Rachel Maclean, 2017). The film examines the current post-truth era in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their own beliefs, rather than one based on objective facts. Exhibited in the Main Hall of the gallery, the space in which it’s show in is dressed up and designed to resonate with the film – with blue curtains and gold silk sashes draped from the ceiling, coming together to look like a royal hall – perhaps indicating that it’s a room in the mansion that Pic lives in. The video is show in portrait, compared to the traditional landscape mode, presenting to the viewers another dimension that isn’t too dissimilar to our own – perhaps it’s a metaphor for our phone screens, but Maclean states that the film ‘presents a post-truth dystopia where the world is turned on its head” so turning the film from landscape to portrait could be a representation of this.
Installation view: Rachel Maclean, Zabludowicz Collection, London. Make Me Up (gallery edition), 2018. Digital video installation. Commissioned by the BBC and 14-18 NOW. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo: David Bebber
The second part of the exhibition is an interactive experience called I’m Terribly Sorry, which was commissioned in virtual reality. The experience is set in a dystopian urban British landscape of oversized tourist merchandise – reflecting a culture of insatiable voyeurism, and questioning what it is to be British in a post Brexit world. You as the player in this seemingly post-apocalyptic world, presented as a tourist. With nothing to arm yourself with, except a mobile phone, you can only take photographs of the giant-zombie like characters – indicating that in modern society, you can do as much damage with a mobile phone as you can a weapon. Experiencing this work in virtual reality is something very different in contemporary art, but it’s definitely being used by more and more artists as popularity grows within digital media. Maclean is re-appropriating the idea of virtual reality for a piece of art that is critiquing the very idea of what reality is.
Installation view: Rachel Maclean, Zabludowicz Collection, London. I’m Terribly Sorry, 2018. Virtual reality installation. Produced in collaboration with Werkflow. Commissioned in partnership with Arsenal Contemporary. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo: David Bebber
In the back gallery, we are presented with the exclusive showing of Maclean’s most recent film Make Me Up (2018), made in collaboration for the BBC. Maclean plays the role an authoritarian diva who speaks with the voice of Kenneth Clark from a BBC show in the sixties, but this is the first film that Maclean employs other actors to play the other characters. The dark film takes place in a world where surveillance, violence and submission are normalised, and deals with contemporary feminism, the challenges faced by women against patriarchal abusers of power, and body image. The film allows for a “discussion of how women’s bodies, voices and minds contend with a world that all too often prefers you to be slim, silent and subservient.” (Maclean, 2018). The characters have names like Siri and Alexa, referencing how modern day technology uses female voices and names for virtual assistants, reinforcing the gender stereotype/expectation that women are here to serve.
The story details how a young girl called Siri finds herself trapped inside a pink, hyper-baroque styled house where she has to compete with her housemates for survival. The film revolves around the ‘idealistic’ woman, who is pretty, doesn’t eat and is submissive. Like the Spite Your Face room, the décor of the room is decorated in pinks and purples with similar curtains, resonating with the ‘dream house’ in the film, making the whole experience very immersive.
Rachel Maclean, Make Me Up, 2018 (still). Courtesy of the artist. © Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean’s work is being showed at the Zabludowicz Collection until the 16th December. If you’re particularly interested in work that critiques contemporary society, whilst being somewhat comedic and scary, Maclean’s work is definitely one to check out. You can also see the film at various cinema screenings in the U.K, which can be found here and it will also be broadcasted on BBC4 In November.
www.zabludowiczcollection.com/exhibitions/view/rachel-maclean
