Moving between photography and video, the exhibition Interior Life sketches an overview of Annie MacDonell’s image-driven, research-based practice. In this selection of works, which spans more than ten years of production, a through-line emerges as the tension between interior (private) life and exterior (political) life that shapes so much of the contemporary world. 

MacDonell’s investigations of current political and social experiences are often filtered through the past. Found images and archival material offer a departure point for her films and photographs. In particular, MacDonell’s inquiry into the early days of therapeutic psychedelic treatment in 1950s Saskatchewan is present throughout the show. Psychedelic experiences (egoless, connected, transcending the self) become stand-ins for the expression of political aspirations beyond capitalism’s focus on the individual.

Spanning fifteen feet, the monumental Ego Death Trip appropriates an image originally published in the Toronto Star (1967). The source-image captures a young woman in the throes of a ‘trip’. Her head is bent forward, as she slumps on a soft couch, lost in a psychedelic dream. Using a method similar to lenticular images, MacDonell segments and repeats the figure across the work’s crimped surface in a shape-shifting arrangement. The figure drifts and disassembles as the viewer moves around it. 

The video OUTHERE (For Lee Lozano), made in collaboration with Paris-based artist Maïder Fortuné, investigates the visual and audio archives of a little-known talk given by the Conceptual artist Lee Lozano, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1971). “The Halifax 3 State Experiment” was delivered by the artist in 3 states: sober, high on weed, and finally ‘tripping’ on LSD. Fortuné and MacDonell weave the archival material together into a dense and layered meditation on the art, life and the afterlife of this radical figure. 

Three works from The Picture Collection use images from the Toronto Reference Library’s Picture Collection to depict a series of dream-like visual games of doubling and repetition. These photographs-of-photographs show representations of aspirational interior design, architecture and mirrored landscape. Rephotographed on a well-used studio wall, the images point to the gap between a desire for interiority and the impossibility of achieving it in our ever connected and mediated world. 
Through Interior Life, the artist positions the distance between the interior/exterior and individual/group as an ongoing and impossible negotiation. A tension between the desire to retreat into the self and the pressure to participate in contemporary social and political life.

Annie MacDonell (b. 1976, Windsor) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her formal training was in photography and the image continues to play a central role in her projects, but her work also includes installation, film, sculpture, writing, and performance. In recent years, film has become a focus. Her films (sometimes produced with collaborator Maïder Fortuné) are shaped by feminists principles of politics as a daily practice.

She received a BFA from TMU's School of Image Arts in 2000, followed by graduate studies at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in France. Her films "Book of Hours" (2019) and "Communicating Vessels" (with Maïder Fortuné, 2020) have screened extensively internationally. Recently, she's had solo shows at the Audain Gallery SFU, Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, the RMG Gallery, Oshawa, IKG Gallery, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery. She has participated in group shows at The Art Museum of the University of Toronto, CAG Vancouver and Mackenzie Art Gallery. Recent performances have been presented at Nuit Blanche Toronto, le Centre Pompidou and the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2012 she was short-listed for the AGO AIMIA prize for photography, and she was long listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012, 2015 and 2016. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Photography Award. In 2020, she and Maïder Fortuné won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, for their film “Communicating Vessels”.

Annie MacDonell lives in Toronto with her family and is an Associate Professor at TMU’s School of Image Arts. She is a founding member of Emilia Amalia, a feminist research and writing group.