#Rachel macclean for free

Photo by Lisa Ferguson, courtesy Jupiter Artland. Rachel Maclean, upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop (2021).

#Rachel macclean for free

“ I think it comes down to some kind of culture where artists will work for free because they love their work, but I don’t think that galleries should exploit that.” She hopes to see this change as public institutions become more conscious of the systemic barriers to entry facing artists who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds. The issue is not simply budget cuts, she added. But it’s a big problem with public institutions in the U.K., either not paying artists or paying them very tokenistically, and it makes it very, very difficult to be an artist.” “I have been very lucky to be paid for this, and Jupiter have been really brilliant. “As an artist you don’t get paid very often,” she said. All the same, she is not immune to the financial precarity of the industry-particularly as someone whose work is not designed to hang prettily over a sofa. Now one of Scotland’s most prominent visual artists, who represented the country at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Maclean recognizes that she is privileged to have been able to make a career out of her work. figures from David Hockney to Monster Chetwynd. Her profile began to rise that same year, after she was included in “New Contemporaries,” the prestigious touring exhibition of emerging artists that has propelled to fame U.K. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. Her parents were high school art teachers who encouraged her artistic talent from a young age.

Maclean grew up in the Scottish county of Clackmannanshire. Image courtesy the artist and Jupiter Artland. “But it’s almost had the opposite effect, to quite an intense degree, where bodies and physical bodies are seemingly more important than ever.” “You’d think that a medium which was so disembodied would allow you to kind of escape your body, and I guess that was kind of almost the utopian feminist idea of the internet when it started,” Maclean said. Her handheld magic mirror is stand in for today’s smartphone, and if she wants to be the cutest in the land, the mirror expects her to look and act a certain way. It is not difficult to relate the struggles of the Mimi character in the film with those facing any young person who must mediate the world through social media. It seems that to be a young person today is to kind of grow up with this feeling that you’ve almost missed it.” “It was very different to my experience growing up in the ’90s in this time of consumer capitalist boom, when everything was being built and there was a sense of newness. “They talked about this idea of growing up in cities or towns where the shops were closed and this feeling of almost growing up in the remnants of something,” Maclean said. The idea was in fact three years in the making, and came from working with teenagers across Scotland through Jupiter Artland’s outreach program, Orbit. (Maclean will design another iteration of the project to pop up in empty storefronts in towns across Scotland.) But the artist told me that was merely a coincidence. The installation feels particularly prescient now, when the pandemic and accompanying financial crisis have shuttered commercial spaces around the world. The film contains triggering and/or sensitive material about self-identity, self-harm, and body confidence.”) (A “friendly” trigger warning on the way in states: “Despite its appearance, some of the works are unsuitable for young children.

To put it more bluntly, this work-l ike the rest of Maclean’s oeuvre-is bleak. Nicky Wilson, the founder of Jupiter Artland Foundation, said she admired Maclean’s “fresh and frank approach” to issues facing contemporary society. In 10 unsettling minutes, the animated film touches on crises of self-esteem the stress of trying to brand oneself in an online world the rapid cycles of consumerism and changing body ideals and the dangers of predatory behavior online. The Scottish artist, who is known for her darkly satirical video works, built the installation to house a new film that follows a cartoon princess, Mimi, on a journey that evokes the pressures facing young adults in the 21st century.

Photo by Amelia Claudia, courtesy Jupiter Artland.