Jillian Mcdonald: To Vincent, with Love
February 2005
Jillian Mcdonald: To Vincent, with Love
To Vincent, with Love by Jillian McDonald humorously explores fan culture by featuring four video vignettes that depict the artist’s fictional romantic relationship with actor Vincent Gallo. In each scene—“On the Bed,” “At the Locker,” “In the Tub,” and “On the Phone”—the artist digitally inserts herself into footage from the film Buffalo ’66 (1998), in which Gallo stars as the main character, Billy Brown. In this imaginary romance, McDonald and Gallo seemingly share intimate moments, exchanging loving glances or sitting side by side in bed, yet the artist’s desire remains unfulfilled and unreciprocated. The work captures the impact of image manipulation and the online environment on fan fantasies. The Gate Page is a sequel to McDonald’s web and DVD project Me and Billy Bob (2003), in which she inserted herself into scenes from the film Bandits (2001) with Billy Bob Thornton.
Jillian McDonald (b. 1971; Edmonton, Canada) is a professor at Pace University, New York. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Undercurrent, Air Circulation, and FiveMyles in Brooklyn; Régart, La Bande Vidéo, AxeNéo7, the Art Gallery of Regina, and the Esker Foundation in Canada; as well as at aCinema, Milwaukee; and the Philip J. Steele Gallery, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver. Her work has been profiled in a CBC IDEAS documentary, the New York Times, and Canadian Art. She has received a grant and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005) and the Canada Council for the Arts (2021, 2004, 2001), and participated in residencies including Wave Farm, Acra, New York; the Arctic Circle Expedition, Svalbard, Norway; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; the Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize, Dufftown, Scotland; the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada; and Harvestworks, New York.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.