Jess MacCormack - Look What the Clown Dragged In

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Jess MacCormack, “Look What the Clown Dragged In,” 2025

(courtesy of Jess MacCormack and THIS Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 5 from noon - 4 PM. The artist will be in attendance.

THIS Gallery is beyond excited to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Vancouver-based artist, Jess MacCormack.

Look What the Clown 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,” says Jordan Arseneault.