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The brackets are not decorative but structural\u200a\u2014\u200aallowing seams, transport, and reconfiguration while drawing attention to the work\u2019s fundamental dependence on support systems. Whereas blockbuster immersive experiences hide their projection rigs and servers behind seamless surfaces, McCormick\u2019s brackets declare dependency: on the wall, the gallery, the viewer. These visible joints make the work\u2019s construction part of its content, and its critical stance inseparable from its material form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This visibility of apparatus constitutes McCormick\u2019s most explicit political gesture. The bracket materializes what he calls \u201cinstitutional realism\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aan acknowledgement that contemporary picture-making operates within specific economic and architectural constraints.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Malcolm McCormick, conversation with the author, August 2025. The term \u201cinstitutional realism\u201d emerges from McCormick\u2019s practice but resonates with the artist Andrea Fraser\u2019s notion of institutional \u00adcritique as working within<\/em> rather than against<\/em> institutional frames.<\/span> Rather than fantasizing escape (the digital utopia of infinite malleability) or retreat (the reactionary purity of painting\u2019s autonomy), these works model persistence within limitation. The cut that might read as wound operates as suture or scar; the bracket that signals compromise becomes a technology for survival\u200a\u2014\u200aan ethics of endurance that defines constrained engagement itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the bracket exposes the physical structure of immersion, the relationships among McCormick\u2019s works reveal its spatial and temporal logic, a network of formal and conceptual echoes. Third Party<\/em> (2025) and Late Bloomer<\/em> (2025) face each other across the gallery space, establishing a visual dialogue that rewards sustained attention. At first glance, Third Party<\/em> appears as a monochromatic grey field, but closer examination reveals texture and structure\u200a\u2014\u200athe ghostly outline of Late Bloomer<\/em>\u2019s yellow and orange forms hidden within its surface. This relationship operates as a visual echo, with one work containing the shadow or reflection of another. The space between them becomes charged, creating what feels like invisible threads\u200a\u2014\u200aelegant, remote, yet deeply embedded in the work\u2019s DNA. You must physically navigate the space and spend time to register these connections, allowing your body to become the measuring instrument that reveals the works\u2019 dialogue. Similar echoes appear throughout the exhibition, extending the viewer\u2019s attention across the space and transforming perception into a sustained temporal experience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Malcolm McCormick<\/strong>
Third Party<\/em>, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Afternoon Projects, Vancouver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Traversing Protection Spells<\/em> you move not to trigger effects but to register subtle shifts: how Third Party<\/em> nearly dissolves into the white wall at noon, its edges ghosting the architecture; how New Edges <\/em>(2025) throws a delayed orange afterglow that hovers over the panel at dusk. These are not programmed responses but material phenomena that unfold through duration and temporality, demanding patience and attention rather than instant reaction. The works invoke what Merleau-Ponty calls \u201cmotor intentionality\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athe body\u2019s pre-cognitive engagement with space\u200a\u2014\u200awithout academicism.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception<\/em>, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2012), 110\u201312.<\/span> Your body becomes a sensing apparatus stepping sideways to catch a seam, backing up to see how panels visually rhyme across distance, approaching to verify that a colour is paint rather than projection. This embodied looking differs fundamentally from both traditional contemplation and digital interaction. You are neither a sovereign subject commanding the view, nor a user triggering pre-coded responses, but a body intertwined with other bodies\u200a\u2014\u200athe paintings, the walls, the light changing through the gallery windows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At noon, McCormick\u2019s works extend restricted immersion beyond material construction and into phenomenological encounter, directly challenging the common assumption that immersive experience necessarily diminishes critical distance. As Oliver Grau observes in his study of virtual art, immersion has historically been associated with the loss of critical reflection.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion<\/em>, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 13. Grau notes that historically, immersive environments have sought to overwhelm critical faculties through sensory totality.<\/span> Yet here, absorption and criticality coincide. The monochrome panels\u200a\u2014\u200apure blues, metallic silvers, delayed oranges\u200a\u2014\u200adraw you into colour as phenomenological fact. Yet the bracket keeps interrupting, an infrastructural reminder that these colours never float free of support. You cannot disappear into pure optical sensation because the apparatus remains stubbornly present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Malcolm$
Malcolm McCormick<\/strong>
Good Luck Lullaby<\/em>, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Afternoon Projects, Vancouver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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This paradigm proves particularly relevant to current debates about cultural accessibility and spectatorship. Immersive spectacles often equate accessibility with sensory overload\u200a\u2014\u200aassuming that more sensation equals more inclusion. Yet McCormick reverses this logic: his works slow perception down, proposing that cultural accessibility depends not on excess but on sustained attention. As the art historian Caroline Jones argues, contemporary art increasingly relies on intensified sensory experience.^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Caroline A. Jones, \u201cThe Mediated Sensorium,\u201d in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art<\/em>, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 8.<\/span> McCormick\u2019s works propose a different form of access: the right to slow attention, to proximate distance, to being close enough to feel and far enough away to think. *Protection Spells<\/em> thus models what art critic Hal Foster calls for but rarely finds: spectacular experience that maintains critical reflection.*^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency<\/em> (London: Verso Books, 2015).<\/span> Yet it achieves this not through ironic distance or self-explanatory conceptual frameworks but through material decisions. The bracket is theory made hardware, a philosophical position that you can perceive sensorially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Toward an Ethics of Restricted Immersion<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Through his workflow\u200a\u2014\u200ascreenshot to computer manipulation to physical panel\u200a\u2014\u200aMcCormick acknowledges digital culture yet refuses its promises. In an era when immersive art increasingly means screens, projections, and virtual reality, these insistently physical objects mark a critical position. The screenshot origins admit that contemporary vision is largely screen-mediated; the material translation insists that physicality still matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This tension between digital source and analog result mirrors the larger negotiation that the works sustain: between the contemporary circulation of art as image and its persistent life as object. The joined panels can be documented, shared, and liked, but their essential quality\u200a\u2014\u200ahow they hold and release light, how seams catch at certain angles\u200a\u2014\u200aresists photographic capture. Against the cultural immersion industry\u2019s promise that technology can deliver art anywhere, these works insist on the irreducibility of physical encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Malcolm$
Malcolm McCormick<\/strong>
Untitled<\/em>, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Afternoon Projects, Vancouver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Because the apparatus never vanishes, temporal effects assume unexpected importance. Late Bloomer<\/em> appears flat until your angle shifts and the surface suddenly has a third dimension. The visibility of Third Party<\/em> fluctuates with daylight, sometimes asserting its autonomy from the wall, sometimes surrendering to it. These effects do not announce themselves; they require what institutions increasingly cannot afford to give: time without productivity, attention without outcome. The works thus reclaim duration as a political and aesthetic right: the right to linger, to attend, to stay with what resists acceleration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this sense, McCormick\u2019s practice articulates an ethics of restricted immersion. The bracket\u200a\u2014\u200amodest, functional, visible\u200a\u2014\u200aembodies a principle of honesty: it keeps dependence and construction in view, transforming limitation into structure. His paintings propose that immersion need not mean surrender, and distance needn\u2019t mean disengagement. To remain immersed and aware of immersion\u2019s cost\u200a\u2014\u200athat is the task these works set before us. Protection Spells<\/em> ultimately offers protection not from the world but from the illusion that art can transcend its conditions or submit entirely to them. In keeping the seams visible and the apparatus exposed, McCormick models a way of seeing that is both vulnerable and vigilant. Here, criticality is not an external judgment but a mode of sustained attention\u200a\u2014\u200aan embodiment of endurance within constraint. This, finally, is the ethics of restricted immersion: to dwell knowingly within the frame, to see dependence not as failure but as form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The art world increasingly promises total immersion\u200a\u2014\u200afrom Van Gogh spectacles flooding convention centres to teamLab art collective\u2019s sensory environments\u200a\u2014\u200abut Montr\u00e9al-based artist Malcolm McCormick\u2019s Protection Spells<\/em> (2025) offers something more politically acute: immersion held in productive tension with its own apparatus. This exhibition demonstrates what I term \u201crestricted immersion\u201d: 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<\/em> turns this condition of absorption into a political stance by making the conditions of viewing\u200a\u2014\u200aits supports, architectures, and dependencies\u200a\u2014\u200avisible. Here, I argue that such conditions reimagine the ethics of spectatorship: proximity without surrender, attention without erasure.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":273159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7775],"artistes":[7837],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-273197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-qing-sheng-en","artistes-malcolm-mccormick-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273202,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273197\/revisions\/273202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273197"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}