March 4, 2010 | 7:00 PM
Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre | ACAD
Public Lecture
Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist, living in New York. She is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Pace University, where she also curates and co-directs the Pace Digital Gallery.
Jillian has shown her work extensively in all corners of the globe including Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg, The Whitney Museum’s Artport, and The Sundance Online Film Festival. She has had numerous international grants and residencies including Canada Council for the arts and Headlands center for the arts. Her work work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Flash Art, Art Papers, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Village Voice.
Whereas her early works deal with "celebrity" and the misplaced intimacy fans imagine with their silver screen idols, her recent works focus on "fear as entertainment" exemplified in the American horror film. Newer work features non-professional local actors. Zombies in Condoland was a large-scale performance in an urban Toronto park where passersby were invited to play zombies in a low budget horror film shoot. They were instantly cast as actors complete with makeup, costumes, lights, camera, and simple scenes. Undead in the Night was a performance in a forest near Malmö, Sweden featuring one hundred non-professional local actors cast as vampires, zombies, and victims in eighteen beautiful and chilling scenarios set along a three kilometer path. Alone Together in the Dark is a video installation which centers around a showdown in the Arizona desert between vampires and zombies. RedRum, a video shot in Victorian homes in Buffalo, New York, features six teenagers performing as ghostly apparitions.
