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Jillian McDonald
Biography
Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist, transplanted in New York. She teaches art at Pace University, where she also curates and co-directs The Pace Digital Gallery.
Recent solo shows include Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery in New York, vertexList in Brooklyn, TPW (presented at The Drake Hotel) and YYZ in Toronto, Video Pool in Winnipeg, and Edge Media in Newfoundland. Her work has also been shown recently at The Whitney Museum's Artport; Sixty Seven and Foxy Production Galleries in New York; Year Zero One in Toronto; Manifestation d'Art Internationale de Québec; 404 International Festival of Electronic Art in Argentina; BananaRAM in Italy; FILE in Sao Paolo, Brazil; The Sundance Online Film Festival in Park City, Utah; The Cleveland International Performance Art Festival; La Biennale de Montréal; ISEA 2004 in Talinn, Estonia; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in France.
Mcdonald received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, Soil New Media, Turbulence, The Gunk Foundation, NYSCA, The Experimental Television Center, Thirdplace.org, and Pace University. She lectures regularly in North America and Europe about her work and has attended numerous residencies including CFAT in Halifax; DAIMON, Sagamie, and La Chambre Blanche in Québec; EMMEDIA in Calgary; and Harvestworks in New York. In 2006 she will be in residence at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and The Western Front (Vancouver).
Description of Research
“My conscious exhibition strategies engage an audience comprised of a very general public that is not necessarily expecting art or gathered in established arts venues. I interrupt the flow of quotidian public exchange, inviting strangers into momentary relationships. I create websites that infiltrate and participate in online fan culture, offer advice to strangers from storefronts, and find reasons to enter into the homes of strangers. Sylvie Fortin (Art Papers Magazine, Sept / Oct 2005) writes of my practice, "relationships are her medium, fleeting encounters her material"."
My work new media, public intervention, and video is often performative and relational. Much of my work can be stumbled upon in everyday life, and requires the participation of a very general audience.
My work in new media is based in fandom, participation-based narrative, and the popular media. Technologies employed include databases, webcams, custom chat applications, quicktime, flash, and html. I am beginning to use sensors and processing software in interactive installations. Some of this work is beginning to draw lines between digital and performative interactivity - web projects include a data-driven story engine where visitor's written stories are translated into visual stories, an online advice lounge, and an activist project advocating the simultaneous "dispersal and eradication" of invasive English Ivy. Upcoming projects include Free Smiles, which will incorporate Bluetooth technology, handheld devices, “tagging”, and database structures.
In performance, I engage with passersby as a means of orchestrating everyday activities away from their usual context, where audiences are made up of willing participants who are not necessarily expecting art. With a base largely made up of strangers I have shampooed hair in a salon, offered free advice, played games on the sidewalk, transformed borrowed clothing, sewn protective messages into clothing seams, brought plants into homes, and borrowed favourite objects for a month.
In my videos, I plot juxtapositions in popular and official American culture. For example - Charlton Hestons’ roles as hero in Planet of the Apes and President of the National Rifle Association; or my physical resemblance to actress Meryl Streep. I am becoming increasingly interested in film genre and language, fear as a mechanism of entertainment, the cult of celebrity, and the fantasy that propels extreme fandom. My recent work is an ongoing conceptual project in which I digitally manipulate romantic scenes form Hollywood films.