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.
