LOCATION: Empty Storefront, 527 Warren Street

VIEWABLE: Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 2 till 7pm and by appt. 518-526-2999

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: "THE SPARKLING"

The Sparkling is an interactive video installation by Jillian McDonald in which the viewer's proximity to a video, featuring a static chandelier, triggers a "supernatural" response. As the viewer approaches the video projection, this chandelier will begin to tremor, sway, shake its crystals out of tune, and utter a high-pitched noise. Projected large, the video emphasizes the larger-than-life haunted object, with a louder- than-life soundtrack.

The Sparkling bears a titular reference to films like The Haunting and The Shining but also to its monster, the chandelier whose crystals sparkle when light hits them. The chandelier appears as a beacon in horror films like Amityville Horror and Fright Night, tinkling eerily in a supernatural breeze. The chandelier is treated as a monster in other cross-genre films including War of the Roses and Salmonberries. In both films, the filmmakers focus on this precarious inanimate creature as it crashes to the ground, broken and wobbling to its demise.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist, currently living in New York. Originally from Winnipeg, she dreams of the snow-covered prairie.

Recent solo shows and projects include Moti Hasson Gallery in New York, The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery, ArtMoving Projects, and vertexList in Brooklyn, TPW (presented at The Drake Hotel) and YYZ in Toronto, Video Pool in Winnipeg, and Edge Media in Newfoundland. Her work was also shown recently at The Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany, The Whitney Museum's Artport, Sixty Seven Gallery 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, The Sundance Online Film Festival in Utah, The Cleveland International Performance Art Festival, La Biennale de Montréal, ISEA 2004 in 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 attended numerous residencies including The lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Program and Harvestworks in New York, DAIMON, Sagamie, and La Chambre Blanche in Québec; CFAT in Halifax; Em-Media in Calgary, and The Western Front in Vancouver. She teaches art at Pace University, where she also curates and co-directs the Pace Digital Gallery.

About her work:

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 daily 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 in video, web art, and public intervention is often performative and relational.

In my recent video work, I am interested in the American cult of celebrity, the fantasy that buoys extreme fandom, and the mechanisms of fear as entertainment at work in horror films. The presence of my image in the work serves not as a self-portrait, but as a projection of universal emotions such as desire or fear. In Me and Billy Bob, I digitally manipulate romantic scenes from Hollywood films starring actor Billy Bob Thornton, creating a soft critique of celebrity obsession. In Screaming, I insert myself into popular horror films such as The Shining and Alien, screaming at the monsters to scare them away or blow them to smithereens. In Horror Makeup, I apply makeup on a daily subway commute, transforming myself into a zombie.

Caitlin Jones, of Rhizome, wrote that my “work is distinct from many other artists also concerned with the cinematic. Not simply interested in issues of narrative, time, space, or the like, Mcdonald looks specifically at the genres romance and horror and how these constructions become a part of our own experiences” (Rhizome, Oct 8, 2007).

My interactive web works are propelled by obsession, poetics, identity, language, and pop-culture. Some of my work online is beginning to draw lines between digital and performative interactivity - Snow Stories is a data-driven story engine where visitor's written stories are translated into audio-visual stories; Advice Lounge is an online advice lounge which functions via a custom chat application, webcams, and an animated lounge; and Ivy League - a collaboration with landscape architect Kelty McKinon - a playful activist project advocating the simultaneous “dispersal and eradication” of English Ivy.

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. With a base largely made up of strangers, I have shampooed hair in a salon in Shampoo, offered free advice in Advice Lounge, played games on the sidewalk in Ready to Play, transformed borrowed clothing in Tailor Made, sewn protective messages into clothing in Seams, brought plants into private homes in House Plant, and borrowed favourite objects for a month in Borrowed Things.

Artist website: www.jillianmcdonald.net