Jesse McLean
Nacimiento : , Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Historia
Jesse McLean is a media artist and educator whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, especially as presented and observed through mediated images. Interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together, McLean's work asks the viewer to walk the line between voyeur and participant. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Venice Film Festival, Italy; Transmediale, Berlin; 25 FPS Festival, Zagreb, Croatia; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Interstate Projects and PPOW Gallery, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Gallery 400, Chicago; Impakt, Utrecht, The Netherlands; CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Kassel, Germany; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH. McLean is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at University of Iowa.
Director
The language and imagery related to celebrity perfumes are a starting point to think about consumer desires and the corruptness of branding. As if a song and a scent would give the consumer everything. A primary focus of Jesse McLean's videos is the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring people together.
Director
Assisted by a buoyant electro-acoustic soundtrack, McLean maps an evocative cross-country travelogue through elegantly illustrated postcards and the strangely intoxicating language of junk emails.
Director
This tragicomic analysis of communication between humans, animals, and machines was made with original video footage, computer animations, and internet media, including YouTube dog videos, chatbot dialogue windows, and images from iTunes visualizer.
Director
Anecdotally, Andy Warhol once asked the Velvet Underground that the record bearing his name be inscribed with a purposeful skip during the song “I’ll be Your Mirror.” Listeners, faced with the endless repetition of that particular lyric, would be forced to rouse themselves and manually drive the needle onward. The group declined this request.
I’m in Pittsburgh and It’s Raining honors the concept: both the act and the idea of being caught in a reflexive moment. This video is an experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in/body double whose work and corporal self appears in films even if her name does not. Through a purposeful masking of the (sometimes subtle) differentiations between performance and acting, famous Hollywood actress and her double, character, actual person, audience expectation, and cinema magic this video offers a look behind the silver screen.
Cinematography
A familiar landscape of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing. Celebrities observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. A curious narrator reveals little moments of subjectivity that evidence the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
Writer
A familiar landscape of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing. Celebrities observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. A curious narrator reveals little moments of subjectivity that evidence the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
Editor
A familiar landscape of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing. Celebrities observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. A curious narrator reveals little moments of subjectivity that evidence the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
Director
A familiar landscape of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing. Celebrities observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. A curious narrator reveals little moments of subjectivity that evidence the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
Director
A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, 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.
Director
A driving disco beat demands that you nod your head while an ever-shifting sunset doles out questionable advice culled from the top of the pop charts.
Director
In the collage video Remote, dream logic invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal barriers. There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under the surface of a placid lake and at the end of dreary basement corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy.
Director
The “spinning newspaper” trope is a clichéd cinematic device that is used both to introduce major events and show the passage of time in a film. In this piece, an illegible newspaper spins continuously towards the viewer, never arriving but guaranteeing the presence of a steady stream of information. Rather than deliver news, the endlessly spinning paper offers only the promise of constant change, both in the form of news and in the form of its delivery.
Director
Magic for Beginners 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.
Director
Jesse McLean’s The Burning Blue also touches on the relationship between the public and private experiences of historical events. Working with found footage and her own home movies, McLean draws lines of intersection between the most intimate memories of the Challenger explosion, and its occurrence on a globally televised scale.
Director
A cursor drags its way up an endless cascade of digital mountains.
Director
What can a face reveal? Balanced between composure and collapse, individuals anxiously await their fate.
Director
Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system. An exhausted and expectant crowd waits on this narrow span. It is not a wide stretch, but it can last forever.
Director
And oldie from the vaults! Shot on Super8, transferred to video, then rephotographed on 16mm. Or, in the words of John Columbus from Black Maria (where this piece won a Jury Choice award), "An impressionistic chronicle of a winter festival where lighting displays are the chief attraction. Experimental photography amplifies the scene into a sensuous painterly work."
