In her exhibition Monstrosities at Michael Rosenthal Gallery, Jillian Mcdonald presents five video pieces and three lenticular photographs that are as much about the techniques and styles of horror films as they are about the ways we understand visual narrative through film. While Mcdonald departs from her previous work that explored the exploits and the celebrity of actor Billy Bob Thornton, she maintains her fascination with film structure, focusing on the visual dynamics of the horror film genre and blurring the border between the filmic narrative and the everyday. Vamp It Up, 2008; video still. HBO's "True Blood" and the... Read More

One factor distinguishing modernism from postmodernism, one might argue, is the artist's relationship to mainstream society. The modernists who flourished from about 1880 to 1980--from Post-Impressionism through Conceptualism--opposed the general trend of materialist, bourgeois capitalism, and posited various personal mythologies as esthetic substitutes. The postmodernists--who began to predominate in the 1980s--borrowed from the Pop artists of the 1960s a more ambiguous, skeptical view of contemporary society and the artist's role in it, one that was partly satiric and partly accepting (think of Lichtenstein and Warhol). Moral ambiguity and esthetic hybridity continue to characterize most contemporary artwork, with young artists not... Read More