Featuring a post-show dialogue with director Jesse McLean.
Jesse McLean has dedicated her creative research and art practice to exploring what it is to be human in relation to what is not. Her films reveal the deep intimacies and connections formed through these relationships and contrast the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite human desires. This special event highlights a selection of her experimental work.
MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS (2010) 21 min.
This piece examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored.
SEE A DOG, HEAR A DOG (2016) 18 min.
Taking its title from a sound design maxim and using it as a conceit to grasp the desire for connection, this video probes the limits and possibilities of communication. Can we ever truly communicate with a machine, with a nonhuman animal, with each other? Our anthropomorphic tendencies, our fear of replacement by nonhuman forms, even our interpersonal limitations, can’t foreclose the possibility of connection and understanding, a great unknown sometimes called trust.
CURIOUS FANTASIES (2019) 8 min.
The language and imagery related to celebrity perfumes (both descriptive and visual) are a starting point to think about consumer desires and the corruptness of branding. Give us your songs, your smells and we will give you everything. The rich get richer, everyone smells poorer.
THE INVISIBLE WORLD (2012) 20 min.
The present world is packed with stuff. Lifeless objects become imbued with emotional significance, and possessions linked with personal identities, even as these objects bear a cool and distant witness to human struggles. The future portends an intangible new world of virtual experience, how will we relate our materialist tendencies? And what happens to our things after we are gone? In this video, materialism, emotional presence and the adaptive nature of human beings are broadly considered through the lens of time.
SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (2009) 5 min.
What can a face reveal? Balanced between composure and collapse, individuals anxiously await their fate.
