Across her varied disciplinary approach, Jess MacNeil’s works bear the hallmarks of her visual style – slippages of light and depth, stillness and movement, resilience and fragility, shifting viewpoints of both natural and built environments, and our interaction with them.
MacNeil has been making and exhibiting her work, both in Australia and abroad, for at least two decades. Presence and absence occur regularly; her paintings bear areas of dense, carefully worked colour juxtaposed with spaces that are monochromatic or “empty” – open for others’ imaginations to fill. In some works, she makes three-dimensional frames of coloured acrylic – translucent blues, reds, and pale viola – whose paint-worked surfaces appear like skins. The spaces in between allow us to see beyond the painterly surface, through to the structural planes and junctures. MacNeil is equally regarded for her mesmerising digital videos, early works such as , 2006, , both from 2009, quickly caught the artworld’s attention.
