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 leaving tomorrow for San Francisco to install my solo show, Monstrosities, at Rosenthal Gallery. The opening reception, complete with Zombie Makeup Station, is Saturday June 20th from 4 - 9PM. I’m showing one new video titled Zombie Apocalypse - pictured above, with related video and photo works. After that I’m off to The Headlands just north of the city - which as of last summer is one of my favourite places in the world - to stare at the ocean and get lost briefly in the fog.

I am still deeply in awe of the amazing performers who participated in Undead in the Night in Sweden. I remember clearly the sense of waiting for each new audience alone in my ghostly role on the dark wooded path, hearing the forest come alive with opera, violin, dissonant flute, horses’ galloping, actors’ blood-chilling screams, wind in the trees, eerie frog songs, creeping footsteps, fingers like breath on backs and nervous screams from the audience, unearthly sounds. Chilling breezes, a terrifying soundtrack, prickling sensations, sudden shadows, rustling in the bushes, the low orange moon.

Thank you to everyone - I look forward to seeing you all back in Malmö when we screen the documentation. Until then, my dear friends and collaborators.

How exciting to be in New York for this long needed change of guard!
As a non-voter feeling a bit helpless, it is wonderful to witness the United States elect a president who is both deeply intelligent and cares about his country’s future and status worldwide. I did not think this would happen, but am proud to be here to experience it.

If you find yourself in Toronto on the night of October 4th, please come participate in Zombies in Condoland, a new performance in which anyone can star!

October 4th to 5th, 7pm to 7am (all night long!)
Nuit Blanche Toronto

Zombies in Condoland, a large scale performance commissioned by curator Gordon Hatt for Nuit Blanche Toronto, continues my interest in the horror film genre, grafting it onto the phenomenon of urban gentrification. Referencing Toronto’s rich history of zombie movies, the annual Toronto Zombie Walk, and the condoization of downtown artist communities, McDonald directs a legion of zombies who will perform in various late night film scenes in Toronto’s College Park. Zombies in Condoland is a series of night actions that mimic a film set for a low budget horror film such as those by director George Romero whose latest film, Diary of a Zombie, was filmed in Toronto.

Zombies achieved cult status in the past few years, with their popularity growing wildly. Enormously popular zombie walks and pub crawls occur annually in cities like Toronto, Montréal, San Francisco, Austin, Vancouver, and Liverpool. Zombies are instantly recognizable and carry a metaphoric reference to the working class. The Zombies in Condoland are responding to gentrification, moving in on an area which is rapidly changing.

The Zombies in Condoland website invites participation and provides information about the project. Zombies are encouraged to come in character - nurse zombie, business person zombie, geek zombie, sports zombie. They are encouraged also to do their makeup en route, in cafes, bars, and mass transit for more zombie fun! Zombies will also be created on site by professional makeup artists, therefore no experience is necessary. Instructional videos and a map are included on website.

Very very special thanks to Nuit Blanche, Chambre Blanche (Québec), Gordon Hatt, and Thea Munster of The Toronto Zombie Walk.

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.

Here’s one for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. I’ve never been much of a shopper, but this is enough to make me quit cold turkey.

Today in the loo I noticed that in the bottom seam of the yellow Forever 21 shopping bag I used to tote home bathroom caulking supplies yesterday is printed “John 3:16″ - according to Wikipedia the most oft-quoted bible verse. God is everywhere, or at least his evangelists are, including on the bottom end of a sack that once held low thread count fashion and will eventually hold my forever decomposing household trash.

I was reading this article today about a recent presentation at The Kitchen by artists inspired by Youtube, which I unfortunately missed, and noticed a banner ad at the top of the page. The left side said this:

The right side advertised the Bank of America, Bank of Opportunity.
We can easily bring to mind historical instances of what America has found and whom they have saved. Personally I find this statement really unsettling considering, for one, the treatment of the First Nations people on this continent. And the politicization of the Christian Right. And the persistent war in Iraq. And…

This is the least haunting image I can find from the film I started watching last night: the male lead trapped in an attic while bloodthirsty savages (vampires like you haven’t seen them before, see below) claw and pry the windows. I started watching it but quickly realized this was not a film for Jillian to watch alone, at night. So I’ll save it for next week’s trip to Québec City, where no doubt I’ll watch it even more alone, at night.

The snowbound “Alaskan” landscape is stunning, though the darkened town was filmed on a sound stage in New Zealand. Note to self: more footage for Snow Stories. Another snow covered landscape signaling despair, doom, and entrapment. There is no explanation so far for why the townspeople can’t simply drive away.

These vampires are more closely related in demeanor and appearance to the furious and faster frame rate zombies of recent films like 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Land of the Dead etc, than to debonair and handsome Hollywood vampires played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas. That’s a relief.

They resemble the original Nosferatu, or even the blind post-human cave dwellers in The Descent - batlike, with razor teeth.

Gone is the slow courtship, the stealth, the dark beauty… these vampires are messy, blood covered, and undeniably inhuman deadly monsters.

pictured above: 30 Days of Night, and Nosferatu.