Jillian McDonald: Valley of the Deer
Jillian McDonald: Valley of the Deer
SBCC Atkinson Gallery
January 23-February 20, 2015
For over 10 years, Jillian McDonald has been creating work that simultaneously embraces and critiques the genre of horror films. In her videos, drawings and augmented reality, McDonald distills horror’s tropes and archetypes. In earlier works, the artist digitally inserted herself into popular films, simultaneously fulfilling her fangirl’s desire for proximity and disrupting their well-trodden storylines by, for example, screaming in defense rather than in despair. In more recent works, including Valley of the Deer, McDonald explores the ubiquitous fears of the collective unconscious by collaboratively producing her horror inspired videos with local community members.
An immersive three-channel video installation, Valley of the Deer was filmed during a nine-month residency at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. As the artist says, “each scene is a separate composition and a nearly still image where little movement, save hair in wind or an animal moving its head, betrays the stillness.” Comprised of these (almost) still vignettes and substantially longer than her previous videos, Valley of the Deer becomes a composite portrait of the landscape. However, while each scene is nearly devoid of movement, the frequent and abrupt cuts between them anxiously undermine the bucolic setting—both physically and psychologically.
Rooted in local folklore and indigenous animal species, the characters in Valley of the Deer lurk and flit in the viewer’s periphery and on the edge of consciousness. The viewer watches and is watched. The culmination of the video is the most explicitly narrative—the expected, but feared conclusion is made manifest. In their final approach, the characters remove their masks and violently sever the connection between the viewer and the landscape.
For each venue, McDonald creates a unique wall drawing featuring the characters from the video. However, while the video’s dominant subject is the landscape, the drawings solely focus on the figures. Plucked from their lush surroundings and situated in the vast white space of the wall itself, the spare black line drawings still fade in and out like their video counterparts. By virtue of material and scale, these massive figures invade the viewer’s space. McDonald’s set of more intimate drawings on paper functions as a diary of bad dreams, a field inventory of potential predators, or a filmmaker’s storyboard.
In and around each exhibition site, McDonald programs augmented reality artworks that insert characters from the video into the landscape of the viewer. In doing so, she invites viewer participation and obfuscates the separation between geographic locations (Dufftown and Santa Barbara) and between fiction and reality. In Valley of the Deer, McDonald taps into the universal appeal of horror films by understanding that the shared experience of catharsis is more important than fear itself.
Sarah Cunningham
Atkinson Gallery Director, SBCC
February 2015
An immersive three-channel video installation, Valley of the Deer was filmed during a nine-month residency at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. As the artist says, “each scene is a separate composition and a nearly still image where little movement, save hair in wind or an animal moving its head, betrays the stillness.” Comprised of these (almost) still vignettes and substantially longer than her previous videos, Valley of the Deer becomes a composite portrait of the landscape. However, while each scene is nearly devoid of movement, the frequent and abrupt cuts between them anxiously undermine the bucolic setting—both physically and psychologically.
Rooted in local folklore and indigenous animal species, the characters in Valley of the Deer lurk and flit in the viewer’s periphery and on the edge of consciousness. The viewer watches and is watched. The culmination of the video is the most explicitly narrative—the expected, but feared conclusion is made manifest. In their final approach, the characters remove their masks and violently sever the connection between the viewer and the landscape.
For each venue, McDonald creates a unique wall drawing featuring the characters from the video. However, while the video’s dominant subject is the landscape, the drawings solely focus on the figures. Plucked from their lush surroundings and situated in the vast white space of the wall itself, the spare black line drawings still fade in and out like their video counterparts. By virtue of material and scale, these massive figures invade the viewer’s space. McDonald’s set of more intimate drawings on paper functions as a diary of bad dreams, a field inventory of potential predators, or a filmmaker’s storyboard.
In and around each exhibition site, McDonald programs augmented reality artworks that insert characters from the video into the landscape of the viewer. In doing so, she invites viewer participation and obfuscates the separation between geographic locations (Dufftown and Santa Barbara) and between fiction and reality. In Valley of the Deer, McDonald taps into the universal appeal of horror films by understanding that the shared experience of catharsis is more important than fear itself.
Sarah Cunningham
Atkinson Gallery Director, SBCC
February 2015
Exhibition Catalog
| sarah_cunningham_essay_-sbcc_-_jillian_mcdonald_valley_of_the_deer.pdf |
