MacGarry’s series of self-portraits is titled Tribe – another politically inappropriate term, generically applied so-called lesser peoples or groups unschooled in the arts and culture of ‘civilisation.’ In MacGarry’s case, however, the term is fitting. This because his is playing with and against type, setting it up then puncturing it. That the series is inspired by childhood fantasies about a masked hero – Zorro – or the ‘Red Skin’ in the Hollywood Western, or the horror movie – Dracula – means that his ‘tribe’ is not the further misuse of a misused anthropological category as it is an exploration of that category through popular media, which, in turn, is never exempt from imperial terror, institutional racism or systemic violence. An exclusionary and oppressive economy operates in every sphere. Nevertheless, to dismiss MacGarry’s dress-up as politically inappropriate is to diminish a right to fantasy which, for the Bulgarian-French cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov, allows for equivocation and unsettlement, a playing in the margins of a given reality. Projection and breakage, fantasy speaks to overworlds and underworlds. It refuses what we vainly choose to fixate on – Reality, or, the Reality Principle, and its rider – Power.

One can of course argue that Todorov is wrong, that fantasy and reality are inextricably bound, that no reality ever exists without an imagined projection. If this is the case then it is not a conflict of realities that defines politics, but a conflict of fantasies. As to who is allowed self-possession is its noxious frontline. If MacGarry’s characters, or characterisations, may seem odious to some, this is because it is assumed that he has no right to them. As to whether this judgement is in fact just is disputable. Categories are always vexing, never certain. MacGarry knows this. I am doubtful however that he assumes personae for the sole purpose of outraging others. Is it not, rather, the Idea-as-controversy which is more significant? All Ideas are. It is the nature of the beast.

If MacGarry is not in search of himself, it does not follow that he is in pursuit of the parodic or pastiche. If we cannot be ourselves, it does not mean that we ever coolly inhabit masks. Neither essence nor parody is our natural habitat. We veer between the two extremes. Ours is a volatile condition always. It is our inability to accept our radical indeterminacy that is the root of our endless chafing. We wear ourselves. We wear ourselves out. Distress is not only style it is the exposure of our thinness.

With shoulders and arms covered in stickers of goggle eyes, palm trees, fishbones, stars, sabre-wielding pirates, a beaded necklace, plain white baseball cap, blond wig, MacGarry, goggled eyed, stares back at us. Titled Boi, the likeness could have stepped off Bondi beach, Kuta, Natal, or California. The stereotype, however, is scuppered by the artist’s eyes, as penetrating as they are gormless. Camp meets crisis. Type its absurdity. This is pastiche imprisoned in flesh. The body is not a shell. Rather, MacGarry communicates Idea as viscera. The silly stickers, like scare quotes, are illusion.

In Wasp, MacGarry is entirely disguised, barring the lips, ears, a sliver of brow, the figure is impenetrable. Gloopy sweet foam covers the face, an attractor for parasites. As a powerbroker, a marker for privilege, the figure the artist projects is also its own parasite. In Shooter, MacGarry wears red face paint, the pale eye lids untouched, a long black fringed wig, a zippered green shift. The gaze is fixed on the imagined viewer, its expression inviting, even convivial, at odds with the controversy commonly associated with this cultural identification. Survivor is vampiric, austere. But it is Fairytale which thoroughly questions our conception of faces – what they are, what they can represent. Barring a white cord about the neck, a white bow and rosette attached to the collar, the entirety is black. MacGarry assures me that it is he who is behind the mask denied portals for the eyes or mouth.

Does it matter that we can prove that it is the artist? Is this the meaning of a self-portrait – that one is present? What does one see when one looks at a face? In MacGarry’s series, it is its decoy. Its projection and displacement. Do the eyes speak a truth? Are they not mere glassy lozenges for wasps to sup on? And what of faces seen in picture books? If Fairytale tells us anything, it is that faces are hiding places. They do not lie, it’s just that they can never – truly – express themselves. They are compositions, scores, riffs, takes. A playlist without a core.

If it is unsurprising that a painter never paints what they see, they paint themselves, it is because connection is aspirational, it supposes a disconnect. In the end it is not even oneself that one paints. The use of a self-timer ‘is not a particularly easy process,’ says MacGarry. ‘It is a function of self-imaging that is the most singular.’ Process-function-system suggests a way of looking that understands techne as an incontrovertible dimension of being, inseparable from the machines and fantasies it uses to make some fleeting and impossible sense of itself.