Rachel Maclean

With a distinctively warped aesthetic and acerbic wit, Glasgow-based artist Rachel Maclean has enjoyed recent success in the reception of her complex and often challenging video work. Through a constructed synthetic environment comprising computer generated landscapes, toy models, and post-production finesse, Over the rainbow presents a glimpse into a unique imagination.

In scene after scene, we follow our shape-shifting protagonists Dorothy and Toto as they wander off the yellow brick road into sickly-sweet rainbow utopias of the 1970 children’s television show H.R. Pufnstuf and sequences lifted from the 1950s cult horror film House on Haunted Hill. Akin to a pop culture endurance test, Over the rainbow presents a cinematic mash-up, abruptly paced by channel-changing cuts. Maclean’s work is a deliberate force-feed of optic and aural stimuli. Her tactic to overload her viewer stands as a social media metaphor and results in a viewing experience that is both entertaining and terrifying in equal measure.

Raunchy conversations sampled from Sex and the City, a TV interview of Prince William and Kate Middleton discussing their engagement, and varying musical renditions of 'Over the Rainbow' are amongst the wide variety of sound bites that provide an equally unique soundtrack.

Behind Maclean’s meticulous construction of elaborate storylines, stage-sets, props, costumes, prosthetics, make-up and appropriated soundscape is an artist working across all facets of her creation: as writer, maker, producer and actor. In her construction of highly unstable characters—taking cues from fellow artists Paul McCarthy and Cindy Sherman—Maclean renders the body grotesque in order to satirise contemporary life.