Dissolving Boundaries

Annie MacDonell’s video installation explores the unifying potential of psychedelics.

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Psychedelic therapy, famed for its euphoric potential, exists on the scientific fringes yet has become a treatment option for those who seek to heal from trauma. In recent years, as life has become more turbulent and unpredictable, artists have become oracular figures by creating experimental artistic sites that explore ways to navigate this terrain.

The Beyond Within, a video installation in Calgary’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta University of the Arts, shines a light on the work of Toronto lens-based artist Annie MacDonell, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. She offers a densely layered visual narrative informed by copious research. Her videos, interwoven with hypnotic imagery, evoke the new perspectives that can appear when the mind traverses the boundaries of self. 

The installation features two identical interiors that replicate the staging of clinical treatment rooms. Visitors are invited to sit in each room and view a video that retells a patient’s drug-induced trip. MacDonell embeds parallel themes in three additional videos, offering more than 90 minutes of footage across five digital works, merging stories of psychological dissolution and reformation in clinical and art-studio settings. There’s also printed documentation to read, including illustrated medical transcripts from the former Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, known for its experiments with LSD. 

The show, organized and circulated by two Ontario galleries, Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, offers enigmatic themes suited to the scholarly interests of an academic venue. Indeed, the relationship between a teacher and a misfit student is explored in one video, the award-winning Communicating Vessels, which MacDonell made in 2020 with a longtime collaborator, French cinematographer Maïder Fortuné. It underscores the bonds and boundaries of interpersonal relationships, creating a connecting loop between past and present through its metaphorical reference to the Möbius strip. 

A luminous video, OUTHERE, about the late American conceptual artist Lee Lozano, features archival material from Halifax 3 State Experiment, which she performed in 1971 at what is now NSCAD University. Lozano’s intriguing “life-art” practice was characterized by durational corporeal works, including month-long sessions of drug-induced experimentation. The video, another collaboration by MacDonell and Fortuné, shows them wearing photocopied masks bearing Lozano’s likeness, suggesting a desire to summon her essence. 

Following Lozano’s time in Halifax, she disappeared from the art scene, a move signalled by her 1972 work, Dropout Piece. Why did Lozano ghost the art world? American curator Legacy Russell, in her 2020 book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, wonders whether Lozano’s final gesture of negation was prompted by a premonition of the digital age’s creative dilemma, the merging of hypervisibility and invisibility. 

The Beyond Within includes a hall-of-mirrors installation, where an immersive passageway conjures notions of another dimension. On entering one sees, at the far end, a lenticular C-print mounted on aluminum. Titled Ego Death Trip, it represents the schism between mind and body – the fractured self. Psychedelics dim the ego, the show tells us, increasing a sense of oneness. 

The exhibition, curated by Toronto’s Leila Timmins and Regina-based Crystal Mowry, connects art to feminist teachings about collectivity, while reconfiguring the past to suggest that overcoming isolation and ego can yield new connections with both the universe and each other. There’s much to take in here but the material rewards those who excavate its depths. ■

Annie MacDonell, The Beyond Within, at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary from Jan. 20 to Mar. 11, 2023.

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Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Alberta University of the Arts

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