Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist who lives in Brooklyn and dreams of the North.

She makes films, performances, drawings and new media artworks inspired by popular film genres like horror and romance. Recent works feature remote and northern landscapes that through animation and editing, live events, or the presence of figures appear haunted or visited by paranormal events.

Solo shows and projects include the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Air Circulation and Moti Hasson in New York, The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Centre Clark in Montréal, and Hallwalls in Buffalo. Her work was featured in group exhibitions and festivals at The Chelsea Museum and The Whitney Museum’s Artport in New York, The Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Germany, The International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Venezuela, The Sundance Film Festival in Utah, La Biennale de Montréal, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in France.

Question:

What are the roles of horror and humor in your work?

Answer:

I work in video, drawing, and performance. Despite making a lot of artworks that overlap with horror film, I haven’t always been a horror fan. In a previous life I was a lovestruck celebrity fan with sights on Billy Bob Thornton, and inserted video of myself digitally into scenes from his films; but that’s another story. Also, I still do that. I came to horror from the viewpoint of fan culture, and from 1960s and 1970s cinephilia. Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and The Shining are some of my favorite movies. The total commitment of horror fans is inspiring – they write fan fiction, shout warnings to onscreen characters, organize zombie walks, look forward to endless sequels, and share inside jokes.

Patient Zero – Instagram Performance, 2018, commissioned by Zombie Medicine Meeting, Arizona State University

I started watching horror films and reading theory as a means of trying to figure out what about horror films makes being scared a pleasurable activity. Any connection between fear and pleasure was originally lost on me, but the more I watched, the more I understood horror films as safe outlets for exploring horrific events, and the experience can be thrilling. Horror and humour, similarly, seem like odd bedfellows. It’s hard to marry them without coming across as cheezy. In The Shining, Jack’s wry comments and comedic face slip into terrifying dangerous behavior at a climactic turning point, and viewers finds themselves nervously laughing while covering their eyes. In the past, I’ve put zombie make-up on in the subway, choreographed large scale performances in a Sweden forest (link), pit zombies against vampires in a wild west Arizona showdown, conducted hordes of zombies at a fake movies set in the streets of Toronto, and drawn every zombie in The Night of the Living Dead series. Zombies became enormously popular right when I was doing this, saturating the market, so I moved away from direct zombie references. Now I’m interested in more subtle horror, like haunted landscapes that are sometimes populated with animalistic characters from Scottish folklore, sometimes bursting into gold dust in landscapes ravaged by gold mining. What if zombies are among us but don’t look like zombies – for example, dressed in masks in the woods? What if they look like regular people doing ordinary things until they slip over the edge? I’m also interested in paranormal or haunting aspects of nature, as well as micro-performance and ecological holocaust.

Crystal Lake – video, 2017, 48 minutes

Freeze – Video, in progress 2019
I spent three weeks on a boat with 30 artists in The Arctic Circle. I’m currently editing a video shot there, inserting characters (like Elsa from Frozen) and Santa) and inflatables through both performative and digital means, with the idea that the metaphorical party is over.