Group C - Artist Talk Jesse McLean

Jesse McLean

Jesse Mclean is an American media artist who became fascinated by human behavior and relationships. Though her initial aim was to become an animator, her greater passion for movies started to grow when she first came in contact with found footage. It was a spontaneous result of a work with collage material. For Mclean, it is important to create both visual and interactive experiences for her  viewers. In her work, it occasionally becomes difficult to distinguish the difference between humor and other emotions. Mclean is not a full-time artist, but pursues her arts in her free time  

“If you put any footage before an artist, he will put it together in the way he thinks it fits the best” 

– Jesse Mclean.

In her projects, Mclean does not exclusively focus on the use of randomly found video material, but also includes footage of friends or uses narrative texts as a source for ideas. Especially narrative texts seem to be of great inspiration to her. She chooses stories intuitively, though they come along with a theoretical background as well. Jesse often feels strong compassion and empathy for the people that act in her video material. She connects with the found footage on an emotional level. As she prefers working in a socially familiar environment, Mclean lets her friends perform and act in her films. She searches for material on public and easily accessible platforms like YouTube, or from DVDs. According to her, “Internet is just a portal”. Besides the regular use of footage from YouTube, she also creates her own material. From her position as a media artist, the process of creating the “right” combination of found footage and her self-made videos is an interesting challenge. Producing her first experimental film for example proved to be difficult and very time consuming.   

She prefers the use of film, TV, etc. The Internet is just became an indispensable archive to make her life as an artist much more comfortable.

Magic for beginners

Magic for beginners is her final work of her first three short videos, which took about a year to produce. She has a close bond to the people that took part in this project. The emotional connection between her and the actors is an important aspect. Magic for beginners portrays the stories of people that got attracted by media and made a sort of unreal, ‘magic connection’ with it. 

One girl, for example, tells about the moment she entirely fell in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor from the film Titanic. She went as far as to delusion herself into being in an actual relationship with DiCaprio. Magic for beginners ends with a video collage of little girls and women singing the theme song of Titanic (My heart will go on by Celine Dion) It is obvious here that Mclean used YouTube as the main archive, as the material mostly consists of amateur and home videos. 

Magic for beginners intends to raise the audiences’ awareness about possible effects and dangers of the contemporary media culture. Nowadays Jesse presented her work at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide, including some of the biggest festivals from Europe.