If you’ve spent any time online recently, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Smac McCreanor video.
You might know her, though, as the Hydraulic Press Girl.
Sarah “Smac” McCreanor is an Australian performance artist who relocated to LA in 2013. She’s made her name getting “squished” in viral videos, re-creating objects being crushed in a hydraulic press through performance.
“Hydraulic press videos are a pretty well-known and well-received phenomenon on the internet. They’re an oddly satisfying content category … I’ve been hooked for a while,” she tells ABC RN’s The Art Show.
“What I do is take that video and then re-perform it as a human through dance and different costuming.”
She has amassed a huge audience: more than 2.6 million followers on TikTok, 580,000 followers on Instagram and 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, and her videos have accumulated more than 1 billion views.
Now, for the first time, McCreanor’s work has made the leap from the smartphone screen to the gallery wall, with two of the artist’s video series — Hydraulic Press Girl and EMOJI — currently on show at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne.
A satisfying squishiness
McCreanor has made an art form of the side-by-side video, a format designed to encourage viewers to watch a video on a loop.
In her Hydraulic Press Girl videos, one half of the screen shows footage of the machine squashing an object — a soft drink can, say — alongside McCreanor’s performance on the other.
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She uses the same format in other videos, such as the absurdist Chicken Club series, which show her mimicking dancing hens with her friends.
Clever styling — pairing a yellow T-shirt with a green boilersuit to evoke a corn emoji, for example — adds an extra layer to McCreanor’s performances, so it’s no surprise she often begins a video with an outfit in mind.
The self-described “thrifty” artist tries to create costumes from what she has in her wardrobe before buying new pieces.
“I already know I have a green outfit — cool, I can be an avocado,” she says.
TikTok’s self-consciously lo-fi aesthetic gives McCreanor leeway to be creative.
“I don’t have to have the perfect representation of my avocado costume for people to understand that I’m being that avocado,” she says. “I just grab the green sweatpants, and I’m like, ‘Cool, that will do’.”
McCreanor crushes objects in a hydraulic press she bought around a year into making the videos.
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“You never know what an object is going to do,” she says. The results are often “pretty surprising and hilarious”.
“It’s a little bit destructive, it’s a little bit humorous, it’s choreographed, it’s a little bit camp.”
The most popular of the 180 episodes she’s made so far feature food, such as avocado and Vegemite.
“The squishiness of it is so satisfying,” she says.
McCreanor generally speeds up the hydraulic press footage, which is “incredibly slow” in real time.
A passion for slapstick
McCreanor attended dance and drama classes throughout her childhood. As a teenager, however, she switched her focus from dance to comedy, which she calls her “passion”.
“I’ve always loved slapstick,” she says.
The careful choreography of physical comedy appealed to McCreanor as a dancer. “It’s so heavily based on movement,” she says.
Comedy still informs her work. She says Hydraulic Press Girl possesses “an underlying tone of humour” and she wants the audience to laugh at it.
“Even in a fine art gallery setting, people understand that … you don’t have to take it seriously; this performance is meant to be amusing, confusing, interesting, however you want to perceive it.”
McCreanor’s “absolute idol” is, perhaps surprisingly, Frank Woodley, best known as one-half of the Australian comedic duo Lano and Woodley.
As well as a comedian, Woodley is a multidisciplinary artist whose talents span acting, directing and songwriting.
“He’s [also] a fantastic illustrator … he’s a stunt person — he can do everything,” says McCreanor, who takes a similarly multidisciplinary approach to her artistic life.
She studied visual art at university and has “always loved video editing, photography [and] filming”.
“It’s hard for me to only choose one avenue,” she says.
“Hydraulic Press Girl is a great representation of all my merged passions.”
From Brisbane to LA
When McCreanor was 19, she landed a role in the “arena-sized” stage production of How to Train a Dragon, playing warrior princess Astrid.
“It was a really ambitious show,” recalls McCreanor, who performed her own stunts, including flying in a harness over the audience.
The international tour included LA, where she decided to stay despite having no connections in the city.
“I realised really quickly that people love Australians,” she says.
“We have a really good work ethic, and we’re well-rounded when it comes to the arts and training.”
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McCreanor auditioned for anything and everything, landing roles in TV commercials and music videos, and spent the next 10 years working nonstop.
As a teenager growing up in Brisbane, McCreanor was constantly creating, whether writing, producing and staging comedy theatre shows, or filming YouTube videos.
Her life in LA was different. “When I went to Hollywood, I didn’t have time for that because it was all about progressing through other people’s work,” she says.
That all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Overnight, “Hollywood closed,” McCreanor says.
With plenty of time on her hands and nothing to do, she threw herself into producing video content. “I was in the studio filming and creating 24/7,” she says.
Of the multitude of videos she created during this period, it was Hydraulic Press Girl that took off.
“It just spread like wildfire,” she says.
“It’s very interactive. People request things; people want to see different versions of the same thing. It became a call and response with the audience and kept growing.”
McCreanor says exhibiting her work at the NGV is a “full-circle moment”.
“My favourite thing about seeing it translated to a physical space is seeing people’s reactions because I’ve never seen them before. I’ve only ever possibly read them as a comment.”
She has especially delighted in seeing families congregate in front of the screens showing her work.
“You see the kids, they start sitting on the floor because they don’t want to leave, and they’re giggling … and pointing at the different outfits, they’re running up to the screens,” she says.
“It seems so interactive, and I don’t think I expected it to be like that.”
Smac McCreanor is at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne until April 7.
