Jacky Connolly

The fifty-minute piece is set amidst a lightning storm which splices together two realities: a virtual, seaside Italian villa created in Sims, and New York City, shot with a camera. The rupture forms a third suburban, autumnal realm. Ariadne1, of New York and played by the artist, decides she wants to disappear, allowing lightning to transport her into a virtual realm. The simulated Ariadne2 is seen with a red lightning scar upon her chest—a trace of the act, which she carries with her back into the live-action scene that concludes the film.

Jacky Connolly created Descent Into Hell through two different forms of technology. She realized some scenarios as photorealistic 3D animations, incorporating AI image enhancement and “deep fake” audiovisual techniques. For others, she filmed within a modified version of the video game Grand Theft Auto V. The game engine’s built-in editor stores player-recorded scenes as data, which can be altered and sequenced. She has described the narrative arc of the video as “a woman is alone in her apartment in an empty, abandoned world. This opens onto a story of a woman in an alternate timeline on a journey through California. She rides freight trains, explores hidden corners of the city, and encounters strange happenings along the way.” Connolly named the video after a novel by Doris Lessing featuring an amnesiac whose body lies in a hospital bed while his mind roams elsewhere.

OIOION and SHEYMN, a pair of divine beings whose thwarted passion tears a wound from which civilization is generated, producing the Four Alimonies of the intelligible universe and the task of collective emancipation.

Anhedonia (2017) – a machinima film in six parts. Jacky Connolly turns her filmmaking practice towards a mysterious group home in the virtual American South. Several avatars live in three small buildings near the town's railroad yard, where their lives are punctuated by hours spent in front of a screen. Images from elsewhere begin to intrude with mounting intensity, as the boundaries of the film are fractured by the characters’ visual and auditory hallucinations. These moments of psychosis give insight into the characters’ shared histories, as well as the dissociative atmosphere of their cultural landscape.

Depicting various domestic spheres of a suburban north American context, Hudson Valley Ruins is a machinima video that relies on The Sims 3 computer graphics engine to depict the absurd, alienated, and often uncanny lives of several characters, focusing on two young girls and their visions, experiences, and fantasies.

First presented at the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2022, Descent into Hell transports viewers into a post-capitalist, dystopian vision of the United States. Crafted through an innovative amalgamation of scenes from the iconic video game Grand Theft Auto V and Connolly’s original animations, this piece diverges from the game’s central narrative of property theft, violence and mayhem. Instead, it delves into the stark realities of everyday life for its characters, navigating through themes of homelessness, illness, loss, patriarchal control, and a pervasive sense of powerlessness. These narratives unfold against the backdrop of Los Angeles’ neon-lit streets, which, despite their brilliance, echo the desolation of a faded dream.