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Screen Kiss.
Me and Billy Bob, a recent large-scale DVD and web project, fictionalizes
a ‘crush’ I have on actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton.
There is a conceptual component to the project, for which I have
made many attempts to attract the subject including listing the
website on search engines referencing ‘Billy Bob Thornton’,
contacting his publicist, flirting with him from the front row of
his recent country music concert, hanging out after the concert
with his road crew, and handing him a signed copy of a limited edition
DVD on stage, packaged with a letter asking him to accept it into
his art collection.
Unfortunately, Billy Bob has not responded, save a little mutual
flirtation, and I am ready to make him jealous. Screen Kiss is a
video and web project featuring several popular American actors
including Daniel Day Lewis, Vincent Gallo, Johnny Depp, and one
actress, Billy Bob’s former wife Angelina Jolie. In each case
I inserted myself into existing film scenes as stand-in for the
actresses being kissed by or engaged in other gestures of romance
with these actors. I make eye contact with the camera, which functions
as voyeur and Billy Bob’s, presumably jealous, eye.
Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian media and performance
artist, living in New York where she teaches at Pace University.
Her work has been shown recently at The Whitney Museum\'s Artport;
404 International Festival of Electronic Art in Argentina; BananaRAM
in Italy; The Sundance Online Film Festival; TPW and YYZ galleries
in Toronto; vertexList gallery in Brooklyn; La Biennale de Montréal;
ISEA2004; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie.
In 2004 she received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts,
Soil New Media, Turbulence, NYSCA, and Pace University. She is a
2005 artist-in-residence at Harvestworks in NYC.
Mcdonald has recently rediscovered playing the piano and is learning
how to rockclimb. Some of her favourite people are strangers.
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