Josh Lilley is thrilled to present The Enchantment of Reason, a solo exhibition by Rachel Maclean (b. 1987, Edinburgh, Scotland). Drawing parallels between today’s AI boom and the Industrial Revolution, Maclean will transform the gallery with a new body of work utilising painting, sculpture and video to consider the motives driving advanced AI, and how fantasies of power shape its development.
Maclean’s practice spans contemporary art, film, and emergent technologies, frequently starring her as the only actor in elaborate disguise. For her most recent film she swaps costume for closed system AI models trained on her image and archive to produce a new body of work, exploring the tension between artistic authorship and machine agency.
The exhibition’s central video work, They’ve Got Your Eyes, follows The Gentleman, a contemporary tech-bro-come-Victorian engineer, who has invented a process for generating fairies. Beneath The Gentleman’s mounting God-complex runs a quiet dread: that his fairies know more than he ever could. In this context, the phrase ‘they’ve got your eyes’ implies not just uncanny resemblance but theft – an AI running away with an artist's way of seeing. The film’s AI-generated forms spill into the space as 3D-printed sculptures and are echoed again in intricate paintings that further develop Maclean’s synthesis of digital and analogue techniques.
They've Got Your Eyes is a response to the ongoing AI arms race, connecting it to Victorian era invention and the havoc wrought in the blind pursuit of ‘progress’. The work continues Maclean’s recent exploration of creativity and power in the age of AI. As ego shapes technological development, how do we disentangle scientific achievement from the darker side of AI’s relentless growth?
Alongside Josh Lilley, this project unfolds across solo exhibitions at FACT, Liverpool (currently on view); 1646, The Hague, Amsterdam and Sonica, Glasgow, Scotland.
