BIOGRAPHY

Jesse McLean has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including: CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), New York Film Festival (NYC), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), Venice Film Festival (Italy), Kassel Dokfest (Germany), Impakt Festival (Netherlands), First Look Festival (NYC), Imagine Science Film Festival (NYC), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (Switzerland), Yebizo Festival of Art + Alternative Visions (Japan), EXiS (S. Korea), Mumok (Austria), and Green Gallery (Milwaukee).

She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival in Switzerland.
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 and was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies.
Jesse McLean is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, within the Peck School of the Arts and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of the leading film programs devoted to supporting cinematic arts in the US.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2024
JESSE MCLEAN

PROGRAM ONE: Tuesday, February 27th, 2024
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond

Curious Fantasies (2019)
Give us your songs, your smells and we will give you everything. The descriptive language of celebrity perfumes serves as inspiration and source material. The rich get richer, everyone smells poorer.

I’m in Pittsburgh and it’s Raining (2015)
An experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in and body double for a famous Hollywood actress and a glimpse at the behind-the-scenes of cinema production.

Just Like Us (2013)
A banal and familiar landscape comprised of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.

Magic for Beginners (2010)
Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored.

The Burning Blue (2009)
A video that observes the thrill, terror, and boredom found in watching mass spectacles and the unexpected loneliness when you miss them. Concerned with how we, as a culture, watch ourselves, especially in moments of great emotional significance, this video speaks of both the power and the failure of the televised experience to bind us to one another.

Somewhere only we know (2009)
What can a face reveal? Balanced between composure and collapse, individuals anxiously await their fate.


PROGRAM TWO: Wednesday, February 28th, 2024
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond

Wherever You Go, There We Are (2017)
In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying scenic North American landscapes and the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails), his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.
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See a Dog, Hear a Dog (2016)
With YouTube dog videos, chatbot dialogue windows, and iTunes visualizer among other sources, See a Dog, Hear a Dog—McLean’s latest analytic tragicomedy of infinite human desire and finite technological capacity—considers the deficits and surpluses produced by attempts at communication among humans, animals, and machines; both directly and as mediated by one another. (Colin Beckett)

Remote (2011)
There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under the surface of a placid lake and at the end of a dreary basement corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy. In the collage video Remote, dream logic invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal barriers.

The Invisible World (2012)
The present world is packed with stuff. Lifeless objects become imbued with emotional significance, and possessions linked with personal identities, even as these objects bear a cool and distant witness to human struggles. The future portends an intangible new world of virtual experience, how will we relate our materialist tendencies? And what happens to our things after we are gone? 

The Eternal Quarter Inch (2008)
Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system. An exhausted and expectant crowd waits on this narrow span. It is not a wide stretch, but it can last forever.