In Banff today I took a pilates class, ate lunch while enjoying a jaw-dropping view, sat in the steam room, worked ever so briefly, soaked in the nearby hot springs with new friends, and ate an elk burger with pineapple. That’s what I call an artist’s retreat.

I’m in Canadia, as certain American men I know like to call my homeland. Banff to be specific, for a short artist’s residency. I pulled into the parking lot and spilled out of my car, spellbound by the full moon rising over the Rocky Mountains. When I could breathe again, I saw there were two very quiet elk a few feet away from me. I have never before seen elk, and we stood watching each other.

I was born in this province - this is the closest I’ve been to my birthplace in many years. Very nice to be home, especially after Canada won hockey gold.

The desert, the rocky coast, the snowy tundra… you can take a girl off the prairie but you can’t take the barren landscape / big sky appeal away from the girl.

-Jillian

I’m in residence at ASU Art Museum in Tempe, AZ. I’ll be working on a few different projects, the first of which starts next week. Details on how you can participate, below:

“Jillian Mcdonald, artist-in-residence at ASU Art Museum seeks participants in a video installation for her November exhibit at ASU.”

Interested parties will attend an information session and audition on October 15th at 11 a.m.; attend a rehearsal on Oct 22nd starting at 11 a.m.; and be videotaped together on the afternoon of Oct 31st in the desert. The information session, audition and rehearsal will be held in the project’s gallery at ASU Art Museum. No acting experience or knowledge of vampires and zombies necessary, however feel free to do some research online.

Zombies may also, if interested, participate in a further performance on the Light in early November. Contact Jillian Mcdonald, info below, to receive notifications.

Also seeking enthusiastic makeup artists - with or without experience. Make-up artists will come to an information meeting on Oct 15th at 2p.m., and a workshop Oct 16th or 23rd at 11a.m.. These meetings will also be held in the project’s gallery in ASU Art Museum. Make-up for the video will be done at the museum on the late morning of Oct 31st. There is no cost to participate, make-up will be provided.

Please sign up with me directly if you are interested in participating in the project (phone 917.443.8107, email jmcdonald[at]jillianmcdonald[dot]net). Feel free to send questions or concerns. Interested parties who cannot make the scheduled dates, please inquire about alternative times.

*images from Vampire Hunting, Zombie Loop, and Undead in the Night

Off the radar for the past four months, I’ve probably missed a lot of important information. Waiting at the Greenpoint G train station last night I was ill prepared for a poster advertising the upcoming TV series, Vampire Diaries. Reading later about the main characters who are either “beautiful and popular” or carrying “dark, deadly secrets of their own”, two thoughts raced through my mind:

1) how refreshing, it’s high time someone made melodramatic books and motion pictures about beautiful young vampires.
2) Dear Diary, I am beautiful and in love with the dangerous vampire next door - it’s complicated, what shall I do?

Vampire Diaries is based on a series of young adult novels. For those who can’t get enough of Twilight and True Blood - hold your breath; here comes more of the same.

As much as I disliked Diary of the Dead, Romero’s recent zombie film (2007), at least the zombies have some character, albeit rotting and unpleasant. I might actually read their diaries.

At long last, the documentation is completed! It’s also on Youtube…
Note: the sound doesn’t start right away.

…momentarily at least. I can’t make promises in matters of the heart.

I’m tempted to put this in the “Horror” category. It is a sign of true friendship when your friends call to report the love of your life has crossed a line. I have very good friends, but some things I’d rather not know.

I was alerted today not only by CBC Radios’ Q Facebook group but by myriad friends in Canada, the UK, and the US that my special someone starred in a new bad boy role today, and not in a good way. Bad boy is one thing - grumpy is another.

With heavy heart I report Billy Bob Thornton, interviewed on CBC’s Q today, has slightly fallen from my favour. I guess it was only a matter of time - 2009 marks seven years after Mr Thornton first set my heart aflutter.

The interview is here if you care to watch. I can’t bear it myself so I won’t embed the video. Note Mr Thornton “lumps” Canadian audiences into the descriptor “mashed potatos without gravy”, and then walks out on his own performance sans southern charm and with his fellow band members left to fill in the blanks, themselves as lively as zombies - the slow kind. Jian Ghomeshi, our host, doesn’t know what to make of the crew’s uber-melancholia.

The thousands of comments floating around on Facebook, Q’s blog, and Youtube, to name a few, grasp for explanations: drugs, depression, Hollywood arrogance, doomed acting career, “band as celebrity vanity project”, rudeness, etc.

For my part, I believe if BB had called me all those years ago, he might be a happier man today. Just sayin’…

Another movie review (sight unseen):
If you’re wondering what on earth is coming out of that boy’s mouth in the poster for The Haunting in Connecticut, don’t worry, it’s probably chiffon. The film opened tonight and I skipped it, I don’t really like chiffon. Haunting in Connecticut is a true story, like many horror films including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wolf Creek, The Blair Witch Project, and Amityville Horror.

I’ve never seen a ghost, not even at The Headlands in Northern California - a place rife with ghost stories. But I have occasional dreams where someone is standing at the foot of my bed, I always wake up immediately during these dreams, which is haunting. If these ghosts watch me sleep, their motive is a mystery. Talking, laughing, stealing covers, arguing, and kicking are not outside the purview of my nocturnal activities, so maybe the ghosts study my sleep patterns or find me entertaining. Or maybe they followed me from Winnipeg.

Winnipeg physician T.G. Hamilton began conducting séances in his home and recording paranormal sights after the death of his young son in 1918. The University of Manitoba published this video on Youtube, which features the photos. As you can see, the photos are unbelievable. Literally.

That whispery substance emitting from the subjects’ mouths and other orifices is, if not chiffon or muslin, paranormal ectoplasm, secreted by mediums when in a trance state. According to prairieghosts.com, ectoplasm “appears to be milky white in color and smells like ozone.” “Medium Eva C. supposedly produced an ectoplasmic face from her ear during a séance. Many of her “faces” were later revealed to have been cut from a Paris newspaper.”

The Haunting in Connecticut website provides many resources, including Sample Questions for the Dead, should you wish to conduct your own séance. According to their blog, “thoughts may come into your head that seem strange; embarrassing, or uncomfortable. Do not fight them. These are the thoughts of the dead.” I plan to use that excuse regularly.

The strangest fact I learned on the website’s paranormal proximity assistant is that all the world’s haunted houses are in the USA. What about T.G. Hamilton?

Okay I forgot to review the film: it’s late and I digress.

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.

Upper Island Cove, Newfoundland