Jillian McDonald, 'The Screaming', 2007
color video on DVD
edition of 5, 11:20 minutes, looped
The scream - in most horror films, it is a sign of desperation and certain doom, a final plea for help before bloody murder. A female protagonist may as well shout, "Slaughter me!" before letting out a vulnerable yelp. In Jillian Mcdonald's digital video 'The Screaming' (2007), part of her 'Waking the Dead' exhibition at Moti Hasson Gallery, however, the scream becomes an omnipotent weapon against horror-film monsters.
Mcdonald, a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn, is known for appropriating movie footage and incorporating herself into reconfigured narratives. Most notorious, she superimposed her likeness, as a love interest, into several of Billy Bob Thornton's films in her video vignette 'Me and Billy Bob' (2003), which explored the concept of celebrity obsession. But the artist is quick to point out that her works are not autobiographical; she takes on self-styled roles in these projects, usually playing utterly ridiculous and comical characters. The pieces in 'Waking the Dead' are no exception.
Jillian McDonald, 'Zombie Portraits (Jillian and Claudia)', 2007
series of 10 lenticular photographs
edition of 5, 30 x 24 inches
'Waking the Dead' is a jamboree of gory artworks. The deadpan video 'Horror Makeup' (2006) has the artist nonchalantly making her face up like a zombie in front of unsuspecting passengers on a New York City subway car. 'Zombie Portraits' (2007), a series of lenticular photographs, portray Mcdonald and her friends transforming into lurching zombies as the viewer walks by. And the wonderfully perplexing 'Vampire Hunt' (2007), a two-channel video loop, shows Mcdonald as a fang-bearing, red-dress-wearing vampire with a gaping chest wound, stalking through a pine forest. On an adjacent screen, Mcdonald plays a heroine in the same red dress, her neck bitten, wielding a wooden stake and scurrying through the forest. Monster and victim are the same person in this macabre chicken-and-egg scenario - each has mortally wounded the other, and both will soon die.
But the star of the show (the biggest and noisiest piece) is 'The Screaming.' Appearing in scenes sequestered from classic American horror movies - The Shining, Alien, Fright Night, Van Helsing - Mcdonald reverses traditional roles of killer and victim by defeating her tormentors with piecing screams. Early in the video, she seems surprised when her shrieks cause villains, such as Michael Myers from Halloween or Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, to fearfully retreat. Towards the end, however, she revels in her power and becomes a killer in her own right, culminating in a scream that prompts the fiery explosion of a bloblike creature from the B-movie Slither.
Mcdonald's shrieking character is an empowered woman using her presumed weakness as a sonic bludgeon, but always in a humorous way. The brevity of the movie clips, removed from their plots and storylines, exaggerates the silliness of these horror films. Each time I saw the video, Mcdonald's grossed-out reactions to her conquered enemies elicited grins and even out-loud laughter from gallery goers, a rarity in an art world that sometimes takes itself too seriously.
On Halloween night, Mcdonald staged a performance at Moti Hasson to supplement her exhibition. At 7:30 p.m., an undead pack of three stumbling zombies and one vampire vixen crept through the front door, one at a time. A zombified Mcdonald led the group with a slow hobble, hissing through gnarled costume teeth, dead leaves tangled in her hair, her skin pallid and bloodied and bruised. She grabbed a jolly middle-aged spectator and sat him down on a bench. The man wiggled and giggled as Mcdonald, still in character, pulled makeup out of her clutch and blotted his face with white, black, and red paint. He too was now a zombie. Similar scenarios played out throughout the gallery. Person after person was transformed into a corpse. Finally, it was my turn. The vampire, who had been skirting along the walls, approached me with a rather cordial, "Would you like bite marks?" She squirted fake blood onto a Q-tip and dabbed it on my neck. It was cold. "It's edible," she mumbled through a mouthful of false fangs.
Typical of Mcdonald's performances - in the past, she has stuck temporary tattoos onto viewers and sewn lucky epithets in their clothes - the Halloween act was a hands-on encounter between artist and audience members, uncomfortable and intimate at the same time.
Rife with pop-cultural sensibility, Mcdonald's works tend to be accessible to mainstream audiences, though hardly nostalgic. After all, many of the movies she appropriates are fairly recent. She has amassed a following among middlebrow art fans (those of us who were raised on junk food and soda pop, film trailers and music videos), who delight in seeing her tweak familiar movie imagery. Like Andy Warhol and Richard Prince before her, Mcdonald works in a visual language that anyone can comprehend.
Trent Morse
Jillian Mcdonald
Until 10 November 2007
Moti Hasson Gallery
www.motihasson.com
535 West 25th Street
New York, NY
T: +1 212 268 4444
Trent Morse is an arts journalist and a medical writer based in New York. He has an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he produced a collection of stories about artists who use celebrity subject matter in their work.
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