Rachel Maclean : i'm 2 happy!

The game is late-stage capitalism, and its appetite is insatiable. Consume or be consumed. Feed yourself, and your dreams. Achieve true happiness by sustained success. Rate yourself, and survey everything you purchase and consume, so we can continue improving and innovating. If there was a symbol for this era, it might be the smiley face. In Rachel Maclean’s work, wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked smiley faces unnerve in how saccharinely they radiate the cyclical violence of consumerism. 

In Feed Me (2015), one of Maclean’s longest and most ambitious films to date, society’s simultaneous infantilisation and sexualisation of women is portrayed through the classic fairytale story between beast and young girl. In what could be a reworking of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth – Maclean constructs an entire world encrusted with prosthetics and crystallised by hairspray, at once slick, shiny, cute, and dirty, seedy, dripping with disgust. In its artifice, theatricality, playful irony and exaggeration, the work oozes camp, and yet at the same time its dark humour criticises the very thing it portrays. 

Installed near the entrance, Maclean’s 2013 film Germs takes on a new layer of meaning in our post-pandemic world. Her army of invasive, giggling bacteria seem adorably harmless at first, yet quickly our self-protection becomes commodified, killing not just the germs but also ourselves. Our self-imaging – through the internet, through advertising – has siphoned off to the economy every part of our bodies, and, in Maclean’s parallel universe, even our souls. There are times in her films when you see the edge of her costumes: the seam of the prosthetics, the wig cap, the layers of makeup embedded in fake wrinkles. Her characters are all the more grotesque in their unravelling – no longer just monstrous versions of ourselves, but also melting and breaking before our eyes.