Bren O'Callaghan Introduces Jarman-Arward-Shortlisted Rachel Maclean's Solo Show 'Wot u

Artist Rachel Maclean has been selected as one of the 2016 Frieze Film artists, and will also represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale, and is shortlisted for the Jarman Award.

Her first major solo show, an entire new body of work, is currently on at HOME, Manchester

The show, Wot u :-) about?, is centered on a linked series of three new video works, also featuring larger-than-life figurative sculptures that directly relate to and overlap with the props, costumes and aesthetic found within her films.

Co-curator Bren O’Callaghan, Co-Curator and Visual Arts Programme Manager at HOME, Manchester, has written an exclusive introduction for After Nyne.

It’s a familiar scene. You look up from your phone en route to work to find that everyone within sight is similarly transfixed by his or her own pocket hypno-disc. A flush of shame hits, you bundle it away and swear that it will stay hidden for the rest of the journey. Outside, people are walking and texting, oblivious to hazards ahead. A woman steps into the road whilst texting and is almost hit by a car. A couple in a café sit across from each other, transfixed by their palm-held avatars. A white van man appears to be watching match highlights as he negotiates a roundabout with one hand and only peripheral vision. If this were the classic movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it’s right about now that someone needs to walk into shot, point at you without your phone, and scream.

Wot u :-) about? at HOME, Manchester, presents a major solo exhibition of entirely new work by acclaimed Scottish artist Rachel Maclean, who will represent Scotland at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Maclean creates vibrant fantasy worlds to explores ideas of happiness and innocence as qualities that can be packaged and sold, resulting in dark and unsettling adventures located in a queasy netherland reminiscent of the supersaturated, candy-coloured palette of children’s television.

Centred on a linked body of new work, Wot u :-) about? includes a large format print series, We Want Data! (2016), developed during a residency at Artpace, San Antonio, plus a new film commission for HOME, It’s What’s Inside That Counts (2016). These premiere alongside a new sculpture series, resembling hybrids of bored commuters, cutesy kids’ TV monsters and sickeningly engorged biological organs. The sculptural figures also function as inanimate viewers for a series of infographic videos, displaying spreadsheets, bar graphs and market research surveys to their unblinking users.

Renowed for her green screen fever-dreams, the 3-channel, 30 minute film installation It’s What’s Inside That Counts (2016) forms the hub from which Maclean’s exhibition spurts and pools. In a dystopian metropolis fuelled by fevered connectivity, a race of rodents beneath the decaying streets hack the sales messages of Rapunzel, a Kardashian-type Demigod, more cyborg than human, a successor to Fritz Lang’s Maria, a Maschinenmensch to rule over the digimash-fed masses. Glued to phones and tablets, the zombified citizens stumble in seach or ever-greater connectivity.

Part Baroque heaven, part post-apocalyptic nightmare, the grotesque, cartoonish figures are seen to share in and compete for attention within a forever connected, corrupt, caffeine marinaded environment where power dynamics are repeatedly inverted and reconfigured, the many in thrall to a media elite. No longer fantasy, the more surreal qualities of Maclean’s work dissolve like effervescent aspirin to reveal a documentary-like snapshot of society at this present, ever-updated moment.

HOME and Cornerhouse Publications with Hayward Publishing also present the first major monograph and colour-infused field guide to the artist’s practice. William Davies (author of The Happiness Industry: how the government and big business sold us well-being), contributes an essay upon Feed Me (2015), a black satire on contemporary capitalism and exploitation, currently touring with the British Art Show. Writer Melissa Gronlund explores the links between fairytale, symbolism and pop culture in Maclean’s work, with an introduction by Sarah Perks and an artist interview with Bren O’Callaghan, curators of HOME’s exhibition, Wot u :-) about, after which the book is titled. Featuring a complementary emoji alphabet by book designer Darren Wall, this is the most comprehensive published survey of Rachel Maclean’s practice to date.

Wot u :-) about?

HOME Manchester

Sat 29 Oct 2016 – Sun 8 Jan 2017

http://homemcr.org/exhibition/rachel-maclean-wot-u-smiling-about/ #WotUSmilingAbout

Curated by Bren O’Callaghan and Sarah Perks.

Publication: http://www.cornerhousepublications.org/publications/rachel-maclean/

FILM SEASON: I’m Too Happy

Selected by artist Rachel Maclean and curator Bren O’Callaghan, our season of films under the banner I’m Too Happy expands upon themes within the artist’s rainbow-dipped yet always unsettling works that address childhood, happiness and innocence as a context, state or quality ripe for commodification and exploitation.

Combining fairytale with horror, animation with CGI, Disney princesses with alcoholic excess, we offer a deep, cinematic draft from a well in which the water may taste of strawberries, but blisters soon bubble upon the lips.

Feed Me (Rachel Maclean, 2015)

Sat 29 Oct - Introduced by Rachel Maclean

Mon 5 Dec

Feed Me is a parable of the pleasures and perils of indulgence, and a wicked, waspish skit on a world where greed is good. Extravagance and excess, are signature features of Maclean’s artistic palette; evident in her obvious love of dressing up and in the multi-layered digital confections with which she drapes and decorates her work. Although these colourful computer-generated effects apply a fantastical candy-coated surface, Maclean lays it on equally thick with make-up, costume and prosthetics: older tricks of the theatrical trade that enable her to appear as multiple characters in a parade of show-stopper performances.

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

Thu 3 Nov

One of the great British Gothic chillers, The Innocents is also the best of the many adaptations of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens, an emotionally repressed vicar's daughter, who becomes the guardian of two, apparently angelic, orphans at a secluded stately home. When the apparitions of a late governess and her sadistic lover manifest themselves to Miss Giddens she determines to save her young charges from the their ghostly evil. But just who is corrupting whom? Freddie Francis's atmospheric and inventive photography keeps us guessing until the film's tragic conclusion.

The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

Mon 7 Nov

The Gothic landscape of the imagination has rarely been filmed with such invention as in Neil Jordan's second feature. Within lavish, expressive sets the teenage heroine begins to discover her sexuality and its dark, unsettling power. Wolves become human, humans become wolves. The film's elaborate structure offers tales within tales, but what really grips is the utterly lucid fantasy. Adapted from Angela Carter’s luxuriously sensual anthology, The Bloody Chamber, starring Sarah Patterson as Rosaleen, Angela Lansbury as the grandmother and Micha Bergese as The Huntsman.

Escape From Tomorrow (Randy Moore, 2013)

Thu 24 Nov

An epic battle begins when a middle-aged American husband and father learns that he has lost his job. He packs up the family and embarks on a full day of park hopping amid enchanted castles and fairytale princesses. Soon, the manufactured mirth of the fantasyland around him begins to haunt his subconscious. An idyllic family vacation quickly unravels into a surrealist nightmare of paranoid visions and bizarre encounters. Made by smuggling cameras and cast and crew into Disneyland, this disturbing satire is guerrilla filmmaking of the highest order.

Alice (Jan Švankmajer, 1988)

Sat 3 Dec

Hugely acclaimed Czech animator Jan Svankmajer's darkly surreal adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic tale combines the director’s live action with his trademark stop-motion animation. A work of genuine invention and wonder that uses sound effects in place of a score, it’s a deliriously dark and often disturbing work and frequently the stuff of both dreams and nightmares.

The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Tue 13 Dec

Based on an original screenplay by Booker prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro, Issabella Rossellini stars as a beer baroness who, at the height of the Great Depression, sponsors a contest to find the world’s saddest tune. A darkly comic tale that is part musical melodrama, part tongue-in-cheek social satire and part phantasmagoria, it bought Canadian auteur Guy Maddin’s cinema to a wider audience.