Works in progress include videos Slasher Cycle and Field of the Dead and Undead, both filmed on location in The Golden Gate National Park in Marin County, CA; Horror Stories, a web-based artwork; and a series of "Body Count" drawings featuring the dead bodies in horror films.
I incorporate performance into videos, installations, and audience participation-based artworks. My work examines popular film genres such as romance or horror in relation to their effect on audiences and devotees. Whereas earlier works deal with "celebrity" and the misplaced intimacy fans imagine with their silver screen idols, recent works focus on "fear as entertainment" exemplified in the American horror film. Unlike contemporary horror film itself, my work eschews extreme gore and violence, in favour of stripped down narrative and character that highlight familiar plot motifs and archetypes. Research plays an important role in my work, and to that end my process includes reading film theory, watching popular films, and exploring fan culture.
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Earlier work features performances either live in urban locations, or filmed in my studio and edited into video sequences with popular film footage. In the live performance Horror Make-up (2006), I applied makeup during a subway commute, transforming myself into a ghoul rather than beautifying my features. The subway audience was unaware they were witnessing a performance. In my video The Screaming (2007), I trespass digitally into brief scenes from familiar horror films such as The Shining, Alien, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, playing the role of a screaming protagonist whose powerful yells scare monsters away or even destroy them. This work hijacks the archetypal screaming female victim, turning that convention on its head by converting her from a helpless to a powerful figure.
Caitlin Jones, of Rhizome, writes 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).
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.
images: (L to R) Slasher Cycle, Field of the Dead and Undead, Horror Stories