Works in progress include a high definition video installation Slasher Cycle - filmed during a residency at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Northern California, a series of Body Count drawings featuring the "kills" in horror films, and an augmented reality artwork for the Wainfleet Bog in Southern Ontario, commissioned by The Niagara Arts Center.
I incorporate performance into videos, installations, and audience participation-based artworks. My work examines popular film genres such as romance or horror in relation to their effect on audiences and devotees. Whereas earlier works deal with "celebrity" and the misplaced intimacy fans imagine with their silver screen idols, recent works focus on "fear as entertainment" exemplified in the American horror film. Unlike contemporary horror film directors, I avoid extreme gore and violence, in favour of stripped down narrative and character that highlight familiar plot motifs and archetypes. Research plays an important role in my work, and to that end my process includes reading film theory, watching popular films, and exploring fan culture.
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In earlier work, performances were filmed against green screen
in studio and edited into scenes from popular films.
In my video The Screaming (2007),
I trespass digitally into brief scenes from familiar horror films such as
The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street,
playing the role of screaming protagonist whose powerful yells scare
monsters away or even destroy them.
This work hijacks the archetypal screaming female victim, turning that
convention on its head by converting her from a helpless to a powerful figure.
Caitlin Jones, of Rhizome, writes that my "work is distinct from many other artists also concerned with the cinematic. Not simply interested in issues of narrative, time, space, or the like, Mcdonald looks specifically at the genres romance and horror and how these constructions become a part of our own experiences" (Rhizome).
Newer work stars non-professional local actors in extraordinary landscapes and settings. Zombies in Condoland (2008) was a large-scale performance in an urban Toronto condo park where passersby were invited to play zombies in a low budget horror film shoot. They were given makeup and costumes and were instantly cast as actors in all round of scenes. Undead in the Night (2009) was performed in a forest near Malmö, Sweden featuring one hundred non-professional local actors cast as vampires, zombies, and victims in eighteen beautiful and chilling scenarios set along a three kilometer path. Alone Together in the Dark (2009) is a video installation whose focal point is a showdown in the desert between vampires and zombies. In RedRum, a video shot in Victorian homes in Buffalo, New York, six teenagers are ghostly apparitions.
images: (L to R) Slasher Cycle, A Prairie Horror, Horror Stories