Silver Eye

McLean’s artwork is an investigation into human and nonhuman emotional relationships, and an exploration of the effects of our increasing immersion into digital culture. Her Silver Eye solo exhibition, When it Rains, it Pours, presents a selection of videos and images that playfully and poetically probe cultural fears of artificial intelligence and other automated systems that replicate human tasks, behaviors and interactions.

A primary focus of McLean’s work is the power-and the failure-of the mediated experience to bring people together. Motivated by a deep curiosity regarding human behavior and relationships, she uses video to examine the ways our emotions are lived in an age of digitally mediated experience. McLean’s recent projects are focused on the fraught relationships people have with their computers. Her work shows us how we have come rely on a technology that we often resent, contrasting the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite capacities of human desire.

Participating Artist

1. Jesse McLean was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her BA in Studio Arts from Oberlin College and her MFA in Moving Image from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is based in Milwaukee, WI, where she is as Assistant Professor of Film/Video/Animation/New Genres at Peck School of the Arts, UW-Milwaukee. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including Projections at New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Mumok Cinema in Vienna, CPH:DOX, Kassel Dokfest, and Impakt. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize, (FIPRESCI Prize) at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and a MacDowell Fellow in 2016. In 2016 she was selected for a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship.

   Her video work is distributed through the Video Data Bank.