Jess MacCormack

Artist’s Statement

Generating AI images through natural text prompts and image extension mechanisms creates complex, uncanny, neo-surreal images that can shift artistic styles seamlessly. As AI tools train on millions of images, there are endless, unpredictable possibilities for aesthetics and content. This allows for a queering of the imagery, where bodies easily morph into one another, or into animals or objects—undoing normative representations of gender, kinship, and embodiment with ease. Simultaneously, it illustrates the dissociated affect inherent in both mediated relations and traumatized individuals. Nonetheless, there are limitations to what this technology can produce, as historical biases, often related to race and gender, are embedded in AI learning. Specific content is also blocked by filters due to companies’ ethics policies, which include restrictions on violence, disease, sexuality, and more. Working around these limitations and finding new ways to express such subjects parallels the emergence of repressed trauma or even queer culture; despite these barriers, these buried themes find subversive ways to express themselves.

Artist Bio

Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political realities of personal trauma.

Jess MacCormack’s digital work has been shared through various online platforms, such as VICE Creator’s Project, PAPER Mag, Art F City, Giphy, and Tumblr. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, Inside Out Film and Video Festival (Toronto), and Mix Brazil Film Festival of Sexual Diversity (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, BR). Their interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), Western Front (Vancouver, Canada), and many other local and international galleries.

They hold an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus University (2008) and served as an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010–2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is working towards their PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.