Love Thy Neighbour, 2024

MacKay (b.1991) is an Australian/New Zealand artist based in Fremantle (Walyalup), Western Australia. As a person with dyslexia and non-attentive ADHD, MacKay’s early academic difficulties led her to painting as a refuge; to centre and express herself non-verbally. During high school, MacKay received formal training at Claremont School of Art, where she studied atelier methods in Classical Realism under the mentorship of Richard Te Kuaha Merito. This emphasis on painting technique led to MacKay’s affinity for large-scale photorealism and hyperrealism portraiture painting. Overwhelmed by the dizzying intellectualism of the conceptual art world, these ultra technical styles allowed MacKay to do what she loved most; to lose herself in the act of painting. Meters in dimension, these flagship works would take a year or more to complete, becoming a devotional practice. Over a five year period, MacKay honed a high proficiency in photorealism and hyperrealism, which culminated with her winning the 2019 Archibald ‘Packing Room Prize’, and a 2022 exhibit Retrospective.

Yet, increasingly aware of the capital ‘A’ art world’s dismissal of photorealism and hyperrealism as technical flourishes largely devoid of intrigue and meaning, MacKay grew determined to bring these styles – what had become her entire practice – into more conceptual territory. In 2023, Tessa returned to university, as a mature age visual arts student, to reflect on the time consuming nature of photorealism and hyperrealism painting; how this considerable allocation of labour, as a metric of value, often dictates a photo-real/hyperreal painter’s inclination to seek out ‘high value’ source imagery; to justify the thousands of hours spent. MacKay posited this notion of commensurate values as responsible for photorealism and hyperrealism’s homogenised aesthetic and perception as conceptually limited. In response, MacKay’s practice turned in on itself to interrogate the question; what constitutes an image worth painting? This has seen MacKay explore the French “Trompe l’Oeil” (“deceiving the eye”) aesthetic – a precursory style to photorealism – in the form small and often subversive works. But in particular, MacKay has steered her technical proficiency towards ‘low value’ source imagery, specifically early digital photography of the mid-to-late 2000s Facebook era, typified by users who would upload and ‘tag’ their friends in swathes of un-curated jpegs. By re-contextualising these disposable low-value images into highly detailed and time consuming paintings, MacKay draws attention to their archival value; an era of low digital literacy that speaks to something authentic and unretrievable.

Continuing to draw from photorealism and hyperrealism, styles birthed from and reliant on analogue and digital photography, while also blending formalist aspects of Classical Realism, 17th century Dutch Golden Age painters and 18th century Neo-Impressionists, MacKay’s practice has grown to index step-changes in image making and sharing technologies. From the advent of early digital photography and its collision with user-driven social networks, to rapid advances in AI image generating software, MacKay’s works seek to examine and reflect on how these technology epochs shift our means of attributing value – or more specifically meaning – to images, in both problematising and affirming ways.