Josh Lilley Gallery
Rachel Maclean
05.June.26 – 01.August.26

Josh Lilley presents The Enchantment of Reason, a solo exhibition by Rachel Maclean (b. 1987, Edinburgh, Scotland).

Working at the forefront of art making in the digital age, Maclean’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates emergent technologies to reflect and refract contemporary society. The artist’s most recent body of work focuses on the effects of Artificial Intelligence on our understanding of creativity, authorship and autonomy, drawing parallels from the “Fairy Mania” that emerged during the Industrial Revolution. 

Through visualising the language and behaviour we employ to discuss and interact with AI, Maclean conducts a typically recursive investigation into the premise and promise of computer agency. The works embody our dismissive references to the “slop” of clumsy, generative imitations, as well as a quasi-religious reverence for a forensic intelligence with a reasoning capacity far greater than our own. They are altars to our dual derision and awe of this digital innovation, as well as expositions of the human fantasies of power that drive it.

Grounded in the historical cycles of technological boom and bust, the exhibition draws inspiration from the invention and nostalgia of the High Victorian era. As Britain’s scientific understanding of the world was dismantled and expanded through the Industrial Revolution, a longing for the folkloric bloomed. Peering into newly developed microscopes, people saw fairies hovering in the warped edges of the glass. The discovery of a previously unseen world spurred a resurgence in popular interest for- and sometimes active belief in- further, mystical realms. Intricately decorative fantasy art, like that of Joseph Noel Paton and Richard Doyle, flourished in response to a world increasingly explained through science and industry. From this amalgamated aesthetic of silken wings, gilt and burgeoning scientific experiment, Maclean has built a visual matrix with which to examine today’s machine revolution. The LED lamps of her impish fairies light visitors’ way through the gloom of the gallery space and the murky technological future.

Maclean’s investigation is extrapolated across a breadth of physical media. Paintings flicker like motherboards. Pearlescent contortions of classical sculptures are finely printed with the utmost delicacy. At the centre of the exhibition is They’ve Got Your Eyes: a film that follows ‘The Gentleman’, a contemporary tech-bro-come-Victorian-engineer, who has invented a process for generating fairies. His pursuit of ‘progress’ curdles into jealousy when he realises that another Gentleman can summon fairies too, and with far greater aptitude. As the two men descend into rivalry, their shape-shifting creations flicker between flattery and mockery: at times disarmingly clumsy, at others unnervingly perceptive. Beneath The Gentleman’s mounting God-complex runs a quiet dread: that his fairies know more than he ever could. In this context, the phrase ‘They’ve got your eyes’ implies not just uncanny resemblance between The Gentleman and his spawn, but theft –an AI running away with an artist’s way of seeing.

Whereas Maclean has previously worked as the sole actor in her projects, physically disguised in elaborate costume or veiled in a deep-fake mask, here she collaborates with an AI “double” trained on her image and artistic archive. In a mirroring of the film’s narrative, each creative choice made by the artist passes through the prism of the AI’s interpretation in a process of call and response. Maclean’s movements evolve throughout the story, morphing from the recognisably human into the artificially uncanny as the collaboration between artist and machine becomes more entangled, distorting forms and garbling language.

In the disarming whirligig of this gloopily shifting digital landscape, Maclean plays with our emotive reflexes, exploiting our innate sympathy for a human protagonist or a cute mythical creature. The film dissembles the shaky foundation from which we experience and shore against AI’s increasing influence, deconstructing our presumed definitions of the characters on both sides. Through Maclean’s vivid enchantment, our tightly woven notions of the artificial and the human, sincerity and the synthetic, are complicated endlessly.