Jesse McLean
2021Magic for Beginners
Jesse McLean
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.
Magic for Beginners
The Invisible World
Jesse McLean
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.
The Invisible World
Curious Fantasies
Jesse McLean
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.
Curious Fantasies
Remote
Jesse McLean
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.
Remote
The Burning Blue
Jesse McLean
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.
The Burning Blue
I'm in Pittsburgh and it's Raining
Jesse McLean
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.
I'm in Pittsburgh and it's Raining
The Eternal Quarter Inch
Jesse McLean
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.
The Eternal Quarter Inch
See a Dog, Hear a Dog
Jesse McLean
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.
See a Dog, Hear a Dog
Just Like Us
Jesse McLean
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.
Just Like Us
