Sheena Macrae works the art of compression by playing with our societies' fascination with speed, entertainment, information and nostalgia. She manipulates the product of the cultural industries, takes possession of it and, twisting the principle of post-production, becomes a sort of VJ (Video-Jockey), somewhere between Christian Marclay and Douglas Gordon, appropriating and parodying standardised forms of narration, Hollywood clichés or economic constraints underlying all-powerful Entertainment. Through a series of procedures, the material of film, a real ready-made, is emptied of all narrative content and returned to its superficial essence.
Read More"Sheena Macrae’s videos might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: Pulp Fiction reduced to exactly one minute, Gone With the Wind crunched from 3.5 hours down to commercial break size. Their effect is something like speed-reading: images fly by in rapid sequence, focussing on only the key elements of action... Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life." - Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005.
Macrae graduated from Emily Carr Institute with a BFA in 1999 and Goldsmiths College, MA in 2002. She has exhibited internationally including Becks Futures2 Student Film and Video Festival at ICA, London, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, Sotheby’s, New York (2001), was short listed by Sadie Coles for Observer Student Artists of the Year (2002), has shown at Glastonbury Festival with the Portobello Film Festival, previously nominated for Best Film by Bowiearts (2004), the XXVII Moscow International Film Festival (2005) Imaginaria Festival Internazionale di Cinema, Italy and awarded International Videoart Prize (2005). She has exhibited at the Waygood Gallery, Newcastle (2005), Liverpool Biennial with the Projection Gallery, (2006) and Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney (2006). She has recently had solo shows at Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, Raw Space Gallery, Brisbane, and a monograph exhibition at Musée d'Art Contemporain Val-de-Marne, Paris. She has recently been the International Artist in Residence at Monash University in Melbourne and is preparing a book and solo shows at the City Museum of Ljubljana and Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.
