Jess MacCormack, known as Jess Mac, is a queer, mad, Vancouver-based artist and activist working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.,Working across graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, video, and community art, they turn personal trauma and institutional violence into tools for collective and political agency.
For over fifteen years, they have run a Tumblr project mixing GIFs, transparent PNGs, tarot cards, and social activism into an ongoing, unstoppable flow of thought. “I'm not committed to any medium, I'm not even committed to art! I like to push past the edges of what is recognized as art, to challenge what the role of the artist in society is or could be”, they have said.Their graphic novel Shame Shame, go away and their book-length project Under it All, made about living with mental illness through the pandemic, extend this same interdisciplinary practice into print. They hold an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus University (2008), were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University from 2010 to 2013, and teach at Emily Carr University of Art + Design while pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.
In Cult of Jess (2024), melting, part-animal, part-clown figures set against childlike, starry scenes reflect on the artist's own childhood dissociation and abuse. “Through masks, color, and chaos, I translate trauma into images that carry both horror and resilience, fragments of self that were once forced to hide”, they have said of the series.The 2025 work Elections turns similarly raw, emotional insight toward political dysfunction and disillusionment.
In Black Sheep (2025), a three-part video series released on objkt.one and shown as part of “Open Tabs” during Art on Tezos in Berlin, rainbow-eyed characters, unicorns, and sheep move through magical realism toward connection and self-acceptance. “We cannot hold the darkness inside by clenching our jaws and carrying on as if nothing is happening”, they have said, describing the series as a seeking of release through connection, creation, and making peace with the self.
