New Releases: Laurie McDonald

VDB is thrilled to welcome Laurie McDonald to the collection! McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. We have acquired 34 videos from across McDonald's forty-year career, works that use the video medium as a tool to express new ways of understanding dance, poetry, and the flows of nature, as well as 

documentary portraiture of various cultures, both in the United States and internationally. We are pleased to release the compilation Laurie McDonald: Early Videoworks, a selection of short early video works created between 1973 and 1977. Titles in this selection highlight McDonald's combined interests of photography, dance, video, and image processing tools, and often feature the artist performing for the camera, such as The Dying Swan and The Sleeping Beauty Waltz. In other works, McDonald engages with image processors and audio synthesizers, like the Moog synthesizer, to create illusory, psychedelic images that emphasize movement, shape, and perception in body and nature.

McDonald's early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.