Kate MacDonald
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Kate MacDonald STATEMENT Chernobyl is modern history’s most lasting example of Russian theorist Bakhtin’s “small time” versus “great time.” Nearly thirty years hence, we are far away and still too close to its events to evaluate the social and environmental effects of its disaster. Frozen in time by the evacuation of its residents, but open to the effects of elements and nature, its degradation in space and time exists as its own imperfect archive. One part personal narrative and two parts collective fever dream, “Chernobyl Spring 1986” explores the events surrounding the disaster through recurring themes of young love, wilderness, mutation, and rebirth. The anxiety of an unseen and eternal enemy permeates the work with a suffocating and intimate tension. Described as “haunting” and “visually captivating” the digital collages are assembled from both digital and hand cut images. The real and imagined, remembered and reinterpreted, original and appropriated create a visual chronotope that intertwines our media recollection of the Chernobyl disaster with the artist’s own story. BIO Canadian artist and random troublemaker, Kate MacDonald, is a New Brunswick transplant to Vancouver. She has exhibited her paintings and digital collages throughout North America, as well as Europe, with recent shows in Los Angeles, Washington, Venice, and Budapest. Her paintings have been featured in international editions of Wired and GQ magazine and she is represented by the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, where she has been recognized as one of 10 Artists to Watch in 2012. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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Chernobyl Spring 1986: The Lovers – Billboard #1