euano / to go out

Curated by Mike Patton, presented by the Biennale d'art contemporain autochtone (BACA) / Contemporary Native Art Biennial LANDBACK exhibition at Art Mûr (Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal, QC), 2022

Photographs courtesy of Mike Patton

MacDonald presents euano / to go out as a speculative future of the colonial project that is dismembered and dismantled. By using historic signifiers from this dominant visual vernacular, as a starting point MacDonald initiated this work by looking at late 19th backdrops used by European settler-frontier photographers to establish fictional placemaking that occurred when documenting “vanishing” Indians. Often little regard was taken when fabricating and employing these painted backdrops, these props (most often) depicted imaginary landscapes, which rarely reflected the subjects actual connections to homeland—problematically, with individuals from different regions being photographed in front of the same backdrop.

MacDonald co-opts and subverts the initial intention of these landscape backdrops, by using them as the imaginary setting of the ruined colonial project. In addition, this work pulls in monumentalized bronze bodies as a significant colonial signifier; which aims to conceptually link to their symbolism of broken power as contemporary activism has successfully organized the tearing down of these statues (ridding the land of violent and aggrandizing placemaking settler histories). This work imagines how bronze connected to these colonial legacies can become a decolonized material or reclaimed back into a raw element of the earth. MacDonald pulls various signifiers together to imagine the healing landscape of the future.