In 2020, Jillian McDonald and Kate Teale, friends since graduate school and sometimes collaborators, discovered that they were both drawing holes - intensely. The coincidence seemed related to the combined pressures of Covid isolation, climate crises, and desperate politics, yet the holes are also personal and psychological, and oddly compatible, despite being so entirely different. The concept of the hole seems timely on multiple fronts, and perfectly suited to Undercurrent’s gallery space, into which we descend underground.
This two-person exhibition features site-specific and grouped wall drawings, with a video projected on the wall.
Teale started meditating during lockdown in 2020, and visualized a series of hard-edged apertures that she thought of as “escape hatches”. Made initially as small sketches of minimalistic dark openings, she scaled them up as large wall drawings that interact with the architecture and lure the viewer into seductive but sinister places. McDonald’s dark and crumbly root-filled holes in earth and ice are sometimes harmless fissures found in nature, but at other times they are portents of ecological disaster. Removed from their context, they float on white paper like otherworldly passages or traps, burrows or tunnels, portals or entryways.
Teale’s drawing process is highly physical, with the works made in graphite or charcoal dust either directly onto the wall, or on Tyvek which is later pasted flush with the wall or floor. They create illusions of interruptions in the architecture, revealing a hole stretching from the floor through the wall, and uneasy watery spaces into which we might fall or jump. McDonald’s realistically rendered hole drawings are hung in groups. Her root drawings, depicted flatly to emphasize the soil around them as a hole and negative space, hang loosely near the ceiling. A video combines hole drawings with Google’s AR-3D animated animals (described online as the perfect pandemic activity); the animals appear tentative at the edge of, swimming in, or trapped in digital versions of the drawn holes.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. Most recent exhibitions were held at The Art Gallery of Regina in Canada - in collaboration with Linda Duvall, FiveMyles in Brooklyn, and Philip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art in Denver, Colorado. She participated in The Arctic Circle Residency in Norway, the LMCC Workspace in New York, and Glenfiddich International Residency in Scotland. She has received a NYFA fellowship, media arts grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, and research support from Pace University, where she teaches.
Kate Teale is a dual UK/US artist, also living in Brooklyn. She has received a NYFA Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist’s Grant, and is currently a recipient of a Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy studio around the corner from Undercurrent. Most recent exhibitions include two-person shows at John Molloy Gallery, and Studio10, Bushwick. She teaches at Parsons School of Design.
Image I: Jillian McDonald, an excerpt from Animals On The Verge video, 2021
Image II: Jillian McDonald, Deep Breath, 2020. 30 x 22 inches. Coloured pencil on paper
Image III: Kate Teale, Plunge, 2020. 30 x 46 inches. Graphite on wall
Image IV: Gallery Map designed by Laura Zaveckaite
