Jillian McDonald is the curator and co-director of the Pace Digital Gallery. This Canadian artist, who currently lives in New York, focuses on intertwining performance and audience participation into film and video works portraying the horror and romance of today’s popular movies and their relation to the viewers. She takes unexpected approaches towards the movies with more of a focus on the narrative instead of the gore or sexuality of the movies. She tries to highlight the familiar characters and archetypes displayed by these popular movies and how the audience expects them to act or effect the movie. Because of the nature of her work she is adept at film theory and fan culture. Her earlier works focused more towards the celebrity and the unrealistic world they lived in trying to be found by average people.
Her work, such as The Screaming, takes direct clips from horror movies and alters the plots making the screaming woman, the powerful hero, instead of the victim. The screams she makes when the monsters come towards her immediately destroy them. She is taking the archetype of the screaming scared woman, who usually gets killed early on as being, instead, a powerful force against the evil creatures. This goes directly against what the audience thinks will happen causing confusion and wonder. Jillian is trying to get out of the Hollywood stereotypes and allow audiences a chance to think about what is going to happen instead of feeling calm that they already do know what will happen. It puts them back on the edge of their seats in some ways making horror movies much deeper and less predictable.
The concept of her work is wonderful. Taking audiences and flipping their minds upside down, making them have to work to figure out what is going on. My one criticism is that she takes shots directly from other films and doesn’t try to match her added in sections with her stolen shots. It is annoyingly obvious which she has added in and which are from Hollywood. If she changed this, the audience would be sucked in much more to her films being able to seamlessly watch an actual film instead of two separate ones spliced together.
Here is a link to a clip of one of her videos- http://jillianmcdonald.net/projects/thescreaming.html
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