Articles Available Online

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney films and Internet memes, the Glasgow-based video artist’s satirical fantasy narratives are held together by a bizarre yet persuasive dream logic We go through the looking glass and into nightmarish pop culture wonderlands, digitally rendered in a pulsating medley of lurid pink, purple, yellow and blue: a fluorescent, feline-themed kingdom inhabited by cat-people with high heels and big rubber breasts in LolCats (2012); a post-apocalyptic burning planet where the few remaining humans squabble over their nation status in A Whole New World (2013) Often accompanied by found sound – sources range from an interview with Katy Perry to a speech by David Cameron – these worlds are at once nothing and much like our own   Feed Me (2015), currently on show as part of the British Art Show, is Maclean’s longest and most ambitious work to date Installed in a room resembling a tween bedroom – which adds the cloying smell of cheap carpet to the already intense viewing experience – it depicts a seedy dystopian city where a sinister toy corporation uses invasive online marketing tactics to peddle plastic ‘happiness’ to the masses Characters range from a voyeuristic, pot-bellied business executive to a schoolgirl social media addict, all played by Maclean Using Green Screen technology, she has populated the film with legions of cloned versions of herself, laboriously filled in the background with layer upon layer of hyper-saturated computer graphics, and overdubbed the dialogue with the voices of professional actors Maclean is in fact the sole performer in all of her works – and is just one among a number of recent contemporary moving image artists using performance, personae, avatars and alter egos to hold a mirror up to society and to question identity in today’s post-social media age   Citing the photographer Cindy Sherman as inspiration, Maclean uses makeup, clothes and her own body to impersonate figures male and female, young and old, animal and human While Sherman recreates recognisable feminine archetypes from film and art history, making portraits that look almost