Jess MacCormack

An experimental animation that illustrates a surreal internal landscape occupied by child creatures and animal imagery. A child goes off to school and must reevaluate everything they have known. Fish, dogs, cats & birds interact with fish tanks, living room furniture, poppies, school busses and the first artificial heart technology. They morph and combine with one another, changing masks and creating new creatures in the strangely internalized and claustrophobic environment that they inhabit. Relationships between the objects, animals and sound create a commentary on seeing and invisibility as experienced by the body. The menacing feeling of animalistic predators and prey seeps into every scene, as odd sexual metaphors manifest with alien-like qualities. Everything points against one of the narrative claims that, “Nothing ever happened.”

A music video for Rae Spoon about the violence transgender and genderqueer people face in their daily lives, and how mutual support gets us through.

This is the first part of a four part experimental animated documentary about criminalization in Canada. Many women find creative ways to survive, their stories illuminate the strength and courage these women show as well as the oppressive conditions that define them.

An experimental animation with original sound exploring “how identity development is informed (and sometimes controlled) by psychiatry’s relationship with capitalism and its broader political objectives.” The video focuses on three themes: the history of psychiatry and its relationship to capitalism/consumerism in North America, the MKULTRA experiments in Montreal during the Cold War, and how the self-help movement depoliticized leftist movements after 1960s.The video combines MacCormack’s own research inspired by the work of British documentarian Alan Curtis, whose The Century of the Self (2002, 240 minutes) is one of many texts and influences apparent in this sweeping work.

This animation uses watercolor paintings of child-morphed creatures, poppies and dismembered legs, based on collaged photos from my animation ‘Nothing ever happened’, to produce a commentary on loss. Set to the song ‘Love is a Hunter’ by Rae Spoon reminds us that love can be transformative, but sometimes the intensity of this transformation can be threatening. The surreal imagery reflects a childhood where love is very much defined by one’s ability to hide from violence and pain.

A video based on a report on the Weimar/Ichtershausen Juvenile Prison, written by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. A collaboration with Steven Brown (sound/narritive).