Please, Sir…

Rachel Maclean is known for creating sickly, candy-coloured worlds filled with ghoulish characters. Her video Please, Sir... explores themes of greed, class and dependence as well as the cultural rhetoric of austerity and aspiration. Please, Sir... is a morbidly comic adaptation of Mark Twain’s historical fiction The Prince and The Pauper. Maclean uses the jargon of capitalism and mocks it through exaggerated performance. This is a space where ridiculous internet memes and the irreverent and detached nature of reality television is ‘realer’ than the ‘real world’ where the worlds of cinema and celebrity attest to a dematerialised and fake existence.