Malcolm McCormick Good Luck Lullaby (detail
from the back), 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist &
Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

Malcolm McCormick’s “Restricted Immersion”

Qing Sheng

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The art world increasingly promises total immersion — from Van Gogh spectacles flooding convention centres to teamLab art collective’s sensory environments — but Montréal-based artist Malcolm McCormick’s Protection Spells (2025) offers something more politically acute: immersion held in productive tension with its own apparatus. This exhibition demonstrates what I term “restricted immersion”: an embodied closeness that sustains critical reflection without retreating from sensory engagement. Rather than opposing immersion to criticality, McCormick reveals how the two can coexist. In this sense, Protection Spells turns this condition of absorption into a political stance by making the conditions of viewing — its supports, architectures, and dependencies — visible. Here, I argue that such conditions reimagine the ethics of spectatorship: proximity without surrender, attention without erasure.

The concrete-and-glass austerity of Afternoon Projects on Vancouver’s Powell Street — a palimpsest of Coast Salish wetlands and Japanese Canadian histories — is not a neutral shell but a device that scripts attention. McCormick’s composite paintings meet this device head-on, refusing to let immersion erase the room that produces it. He thus directly engages a question central to contemporary debates: Can embodied experience remain critical without sacrificing sensory immediacy? The works propose a material, rather than theoretical, answer.

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