This week I was a participant in a conference titled Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention, organized by Halifax researchers Robert Bean and Ilan Sandler, at The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Other participants and artists in an accompanying exhibition titled “txt” at Anna Leowens Gallery included David Clark of Halifax, Michelle Gay and Michael Maranda from Toronto, and Luke Murphy and Marcin Ramocki from NYC. California-based keynote speaker Katherine Hayles joined us at the end of the week to discuss code, language, hyperattention and deep attention, and her recent critical writing on transhumanism in science fiction. The transhumanists advocate taking any means necessary, including plastic surgery and sexual selection, to stave off death, disease, gender, undesireable characteristics, and other unpleasant human afflictions. This futurist belief system is championed in novels such as the very strange Mr. Boy.

My interest in obsolescence is in the rise of Free Culture proponents in the face of ever tightening copyright laws, and the obsolescence of past film and television viewing in favour of a more expanded digital cinema and participation-based viewing. I’ll post more on that when I get back to New York.

Although most of the conference daytime was spent indoors in near darkness watching presentations and discussing obsolescence, we took a magical field trip to chilly Duncan’s Cove where Robert cautioned us to stay clear of the ocean’s edge lest a rogue wave sneak up and claim us. Really. We found sponges, urchins, crabs, and mussels washed up along the rocks, some of which we had eaten earlier in the week.

~photos of the expedition by Michael Maranda

Last weekend I installed The Sparkling, an interactive video installation, in an abandoned antique shop in rainy Hudson, NY. Being alone in the space with the piece, which I was for the days and nights of installation, gave me the creeps.

This, in a back room corridor, didn’t help. Okay I set it up but still:

The project featuring several artists in storefronts and outdoor lots, Plugged In, is curated by Hudson’s Melissa Stafford. Plugged In also features a wonderful installation in an outdoor used furniture lot titled Everything’s Rosie by my good friend Christine Sciulli, and a video piece called Plain Text above and in the windows of a furniture design shop by the quirky and fascinating Fernando Orellana.

I came across a post about the use of silence in the film The Descent as a defensive weapon in direct opposition to screaming, on Ben Woodard’s Blog, Naught Thought. The Descent is a British film about a group of friends, all female, who go spelunking in The Appalachians, and find themselves battling a cave full of blind cannibalistic creatures. They soon figure out that though the hungry monsters can’t see, their hearing is extra sensitive, so their utter silence is the only thing that can save them. (Spoiler!!) But it doesn’t do much good in the end, there’s neither a happy nor a cliff hanger ending here.

This interests me in relation to The Screaming, my recent video work, in which I scream in order to scare away or destroy various onscreen horrors.

I made it to WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution - a massive traveling exhibition that is amazingly the “first comprehensive historical survey of feminist activism and art-making” from the late 1960s through the 1970s - on the last day of the show. It was good, if awkward and painful, to see work by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Yoko Ono which inspired me in my early 20’s. My highlights are three works which seem, in 2008, less dated.

Ana Mendieta’s People Looking at Blood Moffitt (1973), is a set of documentary slides featuring people’s curious glances at blood stains on a sidewalk. This public intervention is fascinating and more subtly provocative than Mendieta’s earth-body art. Strange, however, is the installation at P.S.1 in which slides are viewable on a light table, rather than projected.

Marta Minujin and Richard Squires’ Soft Gallery from 1973 but recreated for this exhibition is a stunning and functional piece, and was full of lounging gallery goers when I arrived.

Martha Rosler’s series of collages, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows no Pain from 1966-1972 are funny and disturbing, a notable accomplishment. Her Bringing the War Home series are equally good (she’s recently updated the series using contemporary wartime imagery). Pictured above, Cargo Cult. Unfortunately this looks less dated because, after all, the beauty industry still has a healthy stranglehold on our wallets and collective consciousness.

Speaking of which, on my favourite new radio program, Q, I listened to an interview with Michael Salzhauer, plastic surgeon and author of My Beautiful Mommy. If you’re wondering why post-surgery mommy looks like a Disney femme-bot, the book designer worked for Disney. In the book, written so young children, particularly girls, may “understand” why mommy needs to beautify herself under the knife (I doubt it explains that culturally loaded question), mommy only gets a new nose, breasts, and tummy. She doesn’t get the butterfly wings pictured on the website. They might befit the spotlight sprinkling of pain-free Tinkerbell dust.

From my northern location I am surprised to discover that I cannot access my usual crack dose of web version TV episodes. Lost, for one, blocks those of us attempting to peek from non-American soil.

Speaking of Lost and obsession - if I wasn’t speaking about it I was certainly thinking about it - check out Lostpedia (spoiler warning).

While surfing to the tune of other distractions, I happily came across CBC radio’s archived Q podcasts, hosted by the smooth-voiced Jian Ghomeshi. Billed as “your daily dose of arts and culture”, Q is a boisterous programme. Contemporary art, music, sports, food, tv, pop-culture, science, books, design, sex - it’s chock full of all the good stuff. I dare you to listen to just one.

Virginia B. Spivey wrote a detailed and wonderful article about Fanatic, my recent show in Richmond Virginia, just published in the May/June issue of Art Papers magazine of contemporary art.

Writes Spivey, “The engagement of audience is one of the greatest strengths of McDonald’s work. In addition to its use of humor and physical involvement of the viewer, the work also enlists interactive platforms that reach beyond the confines of the artworld, such as the Internet. In this way McDonald’s work builds a community of fans - people united by their shared experience and interest in her art.”

1708 Gallery posted a copy here, but I highly recommend purchasing the magazine now and in the future. Art Papers has come a long way under editor Sylvie Fortin’s creative team. It’s smart, international, and the only magazine I read cover to cover.

Through June 4, I’m at La Chambre Blanche in the beautiful and rainy Québec City working on a website to provide info about and invite participation in my upcoming horror-themed smart mob performances. For example, Zombies in Condoland, a night long performance at La Nuit Blanche in Toronto. The masthead is the work-in-progress fruit of tonight’s labour.

I was at La Chambre Blanche in January 2002 for a similar residency. I fell in love with the city then and it remains my favourite Canadian city for simply walking around. Today I watched a thin sliver of orange sunset between the grey clouds and the horizon below my feet from the vantage point of the haute ville. Wandering the crooked little streets I found the windows as I remembered them - with open blinds showing every room filled with warm light, books, and gardens of potted plants. Maybe I’m romanticizing but either Canada really is amazing or there’s no place like home.

Justine Cooper’s new exhibition Terminal at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is not for the faint of heart. Juxtaposing her decade-old video and installation titled Rapt with colour photographs of distressed medical mannequins from 2008, the show considers the body pictured through science.

Rapt features animated imagery of the artist’s real body, expressed via black and white MRI imaging slices, and takes the viewer on a surreal tour of her interior in cross-section. Stripped of humanity and outward signs, this body seems more meat than person, more imaging data than flesh, more avatar than Justine.

Conversely, the obviously artificial bodies of medical mannequins Wilbur, Sally, and friends, subjects of the recent photographs, are positioned in naturalistic throes of physical trauma. On a gurney with a mass of tubes set to extrude or intrude; in a post-childbirth semi-shock; or in agony with bullets lodged in gaping head and chest wounds - they seem somewhat human despite the overwhelming lack of blood. Though such mannequins exist for medical practitioners to sharpen their skills, their rubbery masks, bad wigs and unblinking eyes suggest Michael Myers from Halloween, Chucky from Child’s Play, Cindy Sherman’s portraits with doll parts and prosthetics, post-traumatic reconstructive surgery, strange hybrids, and mutation in the case of poor Sally whose baby face came off to expose her mouth hole, lidless eyes, and strange insect-like thorax.

Cooper’s previous works, including Havidol and Saved By Science also investigate science - specifically pharmacology and scientific classification. Her complex aestheticized subjects include questionable practices such as marketing techniques favoured by the pharmaceutical industry, and the collection of animal parts that not only educate scientists but leech the natural world.

pictured above, Sally.

My solo show in Vancouver opened at Third Avenue Gallery on May 1, and will run through May 31. Minutes by foot from Granville Island, Third Avenue was awash in pink from blossoming trees all last week.

Including work from the past five years which can best be described as culture-jamming, the exhibition also features 2 new videos, Superfan and Staring Contest with Brad Pitt. I finished editing the latter a couple of hours before the show opened, the video equivalent of hanging a wet painting. The sweat was dripping from my brow.

From the press release:
“Superfan stars Jillian Mcdonald riding in vehicles with costars Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent Gallo, and Donald Sutherland. Despite their attempts at conversation, the trio of male leads cannot shake her concentration on the Superbowl game. Staring Contest with Brad Pitt finds Mcdonald and Hollywood’s leading heartthrob locked in an endless gaze of a familiar childhood game. In To Vincent with Love“Mcdonald inserts herself digitally into scenes from Vincent Gallo’s film Buffalo 66” playing the ingénue opposite his socially awkward male lead. In Me and Billy Bob, she digitally manipulates romantic scenes from Hollywood films starring actor Billy Bob Thornton, creating a soft critique of celebrity obsession.”

Thank you to Michael Bjornson and Camille Graham for all their support and hard work on the installation!

According to Mint, the web stats application I use, the most popular search term that brings people to my site, following various right and wrong spellings of my name, is “Vulva”. Considering there is only 1 mention of Vulvas on my site - the above intervention titled “Auto Sex Change Operations” for which I placed “Vulva” stickers on hundreds of parked Volvos in New York City years ago, I can only conclude that people are searching far and wide to expose the vulvas.