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

MEDIUM(S)

AI generated images, videos, installation and painting

ARTIST BIO

Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Working with communities and individuals affected by stigma and oppression, they use cultural platforms and distribution networks to facilitate collaborations which position art as a tool to engender personal and political agency. Working in various mediums – graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, video and community art – their work explores queer politics, embodiment and criminalization.

MacCormack’s digital art has been shared through various online platforms, such as Artforum International, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, VICE Creator’s project, White Hot Contemporary Art, Bitch Magazine, PAPER Magazine and Art F City. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Inside Out, Imaginative Film Festival and International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). MacCormack’s interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Academie der Künste der Welte (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), articule (Montréal, Canada), Western Front (Vancouver, Canada) 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.

ESSAY

Look What the Clown Dragged In: AI, Digital Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Dissociation

By Shannon Pawliw

In an era where the self is increasingly fragmented and reconstituted through digital interfaces, Jess MacCormack’s Look What the Clown Dragged In offers a darkly humorous yet deeply unsettling meditation on contemporary identity. Their installation—comprising AI-generated images and videos interwoven with cardboard and text—pushes against the boundaries of selfhood, inviting viewers to witness the disjointed narratives of interior life under the weight of surveillance capitalism, social media, and systemic violence. Through a practice that embraces the absurd, the grotesque, and the melancholic, MacCormack forces a reckoning with the ways digital aesthetics shape, distort, and even commodify our most intimate experiences of self and Other.

MacCormack’s work is rooted in a history of critical digital art that interrogates the intersection of technology and identity. The lineage can be traced through Cindy Sherman’s self-portraiture, which exposes the performativity of identity, and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s explorations of cyborg femininity. However, whereas these artists work within the confines of traditional photographic and cinematic media, MacCormack embraces AI as an inherently unstable collaborator—one that generates imagery at the intersection of algorithmic randomness and human intent. The result is an aesthetic that feels both eerily familiar and entirely alien, amplifying the uncanny dissonance that underlies contemporary digital existence.

For MacCormack, queerness is a fundamental aspect of their practice, intertwined with themes of trauma and the absurdity of political spectacle. As MacCormack states, “Queerness and trauma are central to my practice. In these images the clown-like figures symbolize a mix of childhood, laughter, terror, adults in disguises, trauma and political clowns like Trump.” Their approach challenges the boundaries of identity and perception, embracing the complexity of lived experience while confronting the often surreal and violent realities of the world. MacCormack’s work refuses categorization, instead creating a space where fluidity, contradiction, and resistance coalesce into a powerful visual and conceptual language.

Crucially, Look What the Clown Dragged In situates its critique within Vancouver’s socio-political landscape, where economic precarity, housing crises, and the fentanyl epidemic create a cityscape marked by violence and displacement. MacCormack’s disjointed figures—part mask, part shadow, part puppet—reflect the psychic toll of inhabiting a space where survival is contingent on performance, adaptation, and erasure. The masks in their work function as shields, both concealing and revealing, echoing the semiotics of drag and theatre while also invoking the mechanisms of digital self-representation, where curated avatars replace embodied presence.

As neoliberal capitalism demands ever more flexible and fragmented identities, MacCormack’s work refuses coherence. Instead, their aesthetic embraces glitch, rupture, and contradiction, rejecting the notion that selfhood can—or should—be legible. In doing so, Look What the Clown Dragged In raises urgent questions about the limits of digital selfhood: What is lost when our identities are mediated through algorithmic processes? How do we reclaim agency in a world where the self is increasingly abstracted into data points? And what role can art play in resisting the psychic violence of contemporary capitalism?

MacCormack’s practice—spanning animation, performance, and installation—has long engaged with the entanglement of trauma, politics, and digital aesthetics. Their work resists easy categorization, oscillating between intimacy and estrangement, beauty and horror. In this latest exhibition, they push further into the abyss of digital subjectivity, offering a body of work that is as unsettling as it is necessary. By confronting the ghosts of the digital age, Look What the Clown Dragged In refuses to look away, demanding instead that we bear witness to the haunted, fractured selves that populate our contemporary condition.

March 25, 2025