Today I visited a few galleries, one of them being Josh Lilley which was exhibiting Rachel Maclean’s ‘That’s Not Mi’ work, featureing the project – ‘upside mimi down mimi’ (except the ‘down mini’ lettering should actually be upside down I just don’t have a clue how to do that on wordpress! It was a great exhibition showing the fairytale world Maclean has created for Mimi.
Maclean mirrors and inverts throughout the works, employing technology and fabrication to hit repeated notes of uneasy, uncanny perfection in a seamless, sometimes seemingly virtual space in which the viewer is implicated. Each work is partnered to an inverted double, perpetually upending to reveal new forms and faces – a neat shorthand for the mysterious lack of an anchoring horizon in a digitally mediated life.
Paintings and sculptures of the two Mimis seem flawless and endlessly repeatable, as they are a mixture of digital painting and 3D printing that highlights the creepy effacement of individuality brought about by our screens, our modern-day mirrors.
The last piece you come to in the exhibition is Macleans first fully animated films which debuted at Jupiter Artland in May 2021. It shows the apple-cheeked child and wizened crone – the two Mi’s who are the subject of the who exhibit, as it tests and challenges the protagonist until its dramatic conclusion. It features a mirror who acts as the classic fairytale antagonist and does more harm than good as it isolates her, bullies her and tricks here, until dividing her in two.
This exhibition was particularly interesting to me as I spent the majority on last year on my BA final project creating a comic led fairytale world, not dissimilar to this one, but with far more iterations of the same character, and with far less metaphoric significance to anyone outside of the situation I was attempting to portray. That was very interesting o me though as I found everyone related it to their own experience, often far from the experience I was conveying.