Artist Statement

Izzy MacCallum known as Izzy MacC, is a queer, multimedia artist, whose work explores alternative queer spaces between lived realities and distant fantasy, presenting both artist and viewer with embodiments of fantasy non-linear narratives and performative self-portraits. Their work explores the many multiplicities of speculative fiction, queer self-mythicizations and fabulations; discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure, playfulness, and camp sensibility. For Izzy MacC, artifice is authenticity. And fantasy a means of revolt. Working upon the notion of disrupting the ugly colonial and patriarchal obsession with logic and knowledge as a means of control, the work’s absurdist, low fi, parodic prosumer extravaganza and its non-linear potentialities underpin its mutating aesthetics, ideology, and camp sentimentality.

Izzy MacC’s artistic language is one of high octane and visual excess. Their personal and conceptual exploration of fabulation and construction of queer identities is also reflected through their use of materials and distinctive working process. The process is one that the artist refers to as transpeinturism - creating multi-layered digital collages of photographs, performance stills and found images, and previous paintings in varying build up and degree to then work with either as digital works or prints, video or most often as sketches for their oil paintings. The artist frequently reintroduces previous pieces and imagery, incorporating and fragmenting them with new pieces and collages. Recontextualizing these works allows them to constantly adapt and evolve, creating works that do not adhere to conventions of painting or photography, whilst celebrating visual excess and combing influences of postmodern fragmented bodies and subcultures – more fittingly, contemporary fragmented bodies, collaging together a queer space of creation.

Izzy MacC is inspired by any form of escapism and fabulation of normality or blurring of normality; be that: science fiction, fantasy films or series such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and music videos, drag (embodied speculative fiction). The biomorphic sci-fi horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien. The grotesque glamour of botched plastic surgery. The absurd idealisms of consumer culture. The sexiness of a vampire. The utopias and dystopias of speculative fiction. The Dancing Plague of 1518... The artist’s portraits are intentionally distorted, close ups of features such as lips blown out of proportion until unrecognizable and uncanny. Presenting themselves in a series of fragmented, neo-pop portraits; garishly coloured and mixed with images of cartoons and 3D rendered doodles, and peppered with horror and religious iconography.  

By framing identity as something that can be multiple, infinite, and not necessarily grounded in ‘reality’, Izzy MacC has positioned the self within the realm of the carnival and liminal, their work aligning with the notions of Queer Futurism. This art celebrates the power of queer self-imaginary, hyper embodiment, personae into fabulative planes which transport the viewer out of the drab, everyday monotony, departing us from the here and now.