According to the Apple weather widget, I’ll be killed by bouncing ice balls if I venture out today. That’s what I call a “snow day” - where are my toboggan and toque - Central Park anyone?

Last night I was with my sister Jennifer in the back of a huge moving truck, sifting through boxes. We came across a long thin jar of coffee and I asked if she’d seen the film, a Disney movie about coffee - I said, “it’s not the usual Disney-pretty story, considering the conditions on coffee plantations.”

Jennifer said no, but she wanted to see it. We started to unwrap it from its jar and then she pulled out a long flat box full of sugar cubes. We sat with the film on our lap while she held the sugar box for us to snack from. I saw something lying across the cubes that looked like a mouse dropping - then it moved. It was a worm or caterpillar, and very fast. I swatted it away - then another one - suddenly the box seemed alive with them under the white cubes. I said “Jenn careful, very careful, move that box away and throw it as far as you can”. She didn’t hear me or was too slow and the air or scene around us went quivery as though there was a layer of worms beneath the surface and the sky exploded with dark red flying worms. Worming in my face, eyes, ears, mouth.

Finally I woke up, hot in my bed.

*image from Princeton’s Genomic labs - check out their wonderful worm research movies.

You can never have too much of a good thing. That applies to one of my favourite horror films, Night of the Living Dead.

I just finished reading “Night of the Living Dead” by Ben Hervey, a great little book rife with anecdotes and trivia which contextualizes the cult classic firmly in its historical moment. This is a film that has never gone out of video print since being released, according to Hervey.

That this film relies on non-actors, a low budget, and the resourcefulness of an ambitious crew makes it all the more worthy of story-telling.

When my friend Jenni Quilter friend invited me for a screening last night I jumped. Accidentally she rented Tom Savini’s 1990 colour remake which I’d never seen. Suffice to say it is almost the same film, based on the screenplay by Romero and Russo, but there are some significant character changes, mostly in the female roles. Barbara is heroic, not catatonic; Judy wants to help, not just “stand by her man”; and little Karen is neither little, endearing, nor as angry at dad. The ending is different too but I won’t spoil that - any fan of the original will surely enjoy the updates and the references to other later zombie films (eg. the hunting posse bullying the zombie in the ring à la 28 Days Later). Oddly, the ghoul’s barbeque feast and the dead farmhouse owner upstairs are toned down gore-wise, where everything else is ramped up.

My solo show, Shivers, went up at The Bronx River Art Center last week - and runs through March 14. Visit if you dare! I’m showing video and photo work related, as usual, to horror films. There is a brochure essay by guest writer Erin Sickler, available at the gallery.

The Sparkling is an interactive video installation from 2007. Special thanks to Josh Rose and Andy Mueller for programming and electronics assistance.

The Apparition is from 2009 but features footage shot in 1997 and forgotten until now.

If you’re like Billy Bob Thornton, famously phobic of antique furniture (not to mention in denial of your love for me which is another story entirely), you probably won’t like these haunted chandeliers.

There’s one in my studio right now and it’s freaking me out.

In Saskatoon at the moment it is minus twenty-seven degrees Celcius, a temperature that deserves more than a tiny number in order that you can savour it, contemplate it, or at least try to fathom it. Luckily we humans have very little capacity for recalling pain which is why, in the words of my undergraduate art school professor Sharon Alward, people can live in extremely cold places like Winnipeg or Saskatoon year after year without going insane*. While minus twenty-seven degrees Celcius is reason enough to evoke screams in many people, it scares neither me nor Jo-Anne Balcaen - my billboard project collaborator and friend from Montréal. Jo-Anne and I were actually born within hours of one another and grew up separately in Winnipeg**, but that aside is another story of which I will spare you the details. The daunting temperature also doesn’t scare David LaRiviere, director of Paved Arts who facilitated and helped tremendously to oversee our two-person show.

Scream opens January 16th - come see it if you dare. There will be screaming. You have been warned. The billboard is silent but it requires 3-D glasses - available at the gallery.

From the press release, “Scream is a two-person video installation and collaborative billboard presentation. While Jo-Anne Balcaen studies the scream from the perspective of ecstasy, Jillian Mcdonald approaches the same subject as a device in horror films. The exhibition project arises from the affinity that the artists recognize in each other’s work, and is thus culminated from an ongoing, long-distance creative dialog.

Jillian Mcdonald’s video work entitled The Screaming challenges the horror movie genre’s damsel in distress by inverting the power dynamics and charging the scream with a potency that overcomes any would-be menace…. Jo-Anne Balcaen’s Screaming Girls appropriates famous film images of teen-aged girls enraptured by rock ‘n’ roll performance. Stripped of sound, Balcaen’s subtle manipulation of this familiar pop adulation becomes a study of mass hysteria, oddly foreign to any kind of rationale that Beatlemania may have once produced.”

*Keep in mind these are select few people, you may not want to attempt this yourself.

**According to Wikipedia, the lowest temperature ever recorded in Winnipeg was −47.8 °C (−54.0 °F), on December 24, 1879. The coldest wind chill reading ever recorded was −57.1 °C (−70.8 °F), on February 1, 1996. I was not alive in 1879, but I’ll point out that the last winter I lived in Winnipeg was 1996.