Frances Adair Mckenzie
Frances Adair Mckenzie (born in 100 Mile House, Canada; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) works from a feminist and experimental standpoint. Her practice is articulated around constant research on form, staging, and materiality. Her baroque, sensitive imaginaries draw on digital and immersive technologies—stereoscopic animations in virtual reality, augmented reality installations—as she brings out their capacity to resist commercialization and their power to spread into reality to propose embodied fictions.
The project BEDfellows explores the idea of timeless existences through assemblages of vestiges from the future. Virtually materializing in front of us, a statuette floats in the air, snuggled in a translucent cocoon as little winged creatures gravitate around it. The figurine embodies the generous curves of a paleolithic Venus; a simplified feminine representation, often in the form of an ivory, stone, or terra cotta sculpture. These symbolic entities—the Venus, the cocoon, the insects—evoke the natural processes of metamorphosis, interspecies collaboration, and sexual mimicry. From a holistic perspective, Mckenzie addresses ways in which nonhumans acquire knowledge over time. BEDfellows invites us to imagine hybrid states of life. A poetic experience anchored in speculative fiction, the work offers a reflection, both tactile and dreamlike, on the notion of evolution through mutational shifts that take place outside of linear time. The future is linked to the past, forming along the way presents inhabited by composite creatures. Mckenzie celebrates the redemptive potential of transgression, a state oscillating between deterioration and construction. The project finds its way into consciousness, where it causes colonial and Western concepts of history and temporality to falter. BEDfellows offers humans alternative meanings for living, flourishing, and dying, encouraging us to turn toward new horizons.
Specially commissioned in collaboration for BEDfellows is a poetic prose piece written by Maya Kamala.