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The project Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly comprises two related recent works by Mike MacDonald: an artist's garden designed especially for the Ottawa Art Gallery and presented at Arts Court, and a video installation created in 1994 and entitled Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly. For over 10 years, Mike MacDonald has been creating important and complex video installations. Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly pursues and develops themes present in his earlier works, bringing them to a culmination. Unlike the earlier Electronic Totem (1987), Seven Sisters (1989), and Secret Flowers (1993), which required many monitors and consisted of an intricate composition of juxtaposed fleeting images across monitors, Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly proposes a single audioless videotape looped and continuously back-projected onto a fluttering, shimmering piece of translucent fabric suspended in a dimly-lit space. Facing this projection are seven rocking chairs positioned in a semi-circle - the creation of a gathering place, an invitation to sit, contemplate and exchange. The chairs are also an enunciation of the artist's process: each chair is carefully painted one of the colours of video colour bars. The artist thus divulges the palette imparted to him by the videographic medium which he has used and manipulated to create visual compositions of great sophistication through careful editing of video sequences and subtle mastery of form and content. In Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly, the video projection features a butterfly painstakingly slipping out of the strong, flexible envelope of its chrysalis, freeing its legs and waving them tentatively in the air, opening and flapping its wings, testing their powers. A striped caterpillar munches on a juicy leaf while a host of other butterflies sips nectar from flowers. The apparent simplicity of the video - a deceptively unobtrusive succession of shots whose duration is dictated by their subject - emphasizes the encroachment of technology, the utter inextricability of nature and technology in contemporary life. Furthermore, the combination of dramatic representation, theatrical mediation and simple everyday event imparts the work with a degree of spirituality reminiscent of the work of Bill Viola: the emergence of MacDonald's butterfly from its chrysalid finds an intense and powerful parallel in the portentous breath taken by the man who finally comes up for air in Viola's recent video installation, The Messenger (1996). In response to the Ottawa Art Gallery's location within Arts Court, a building dedicated to artistic creativity, the artist has also created an elaborate butterfly garden - a visual feast of native and exotic plants and flowers - designed as a gathering place, a haven in the heart of the city, an ephemeral monument to peace, healing and creativity. With this garden, MacDonald makes reference to artistic method, to the materials and techniques developed by artists and craftspeople over the centuries. Thus, among the thirty-odd species of plants and flowers he has selected are some from which artists have traditionally extracted the pigments so essential to their art. Others have medicinal properties and are used in the treatment of various illnesses, including AIDS. Mike MacDonald's gardens also find parallels in the practice of a number of other contemporary artists such as Lois Weinberger, Olaf Nicolai and Henrik Hakansson. Their gardens/installations consist of manufactured ecosystems for animals, insects and plants presented through the art institution - both within its physical space and beyond. In all cases, the ecosystems are created and cared for by the artist and the institution. Like Lois Weinberger, Mike MacDonald carefully gathers the plants to be used in his installations, either from nature or from specialized nurseries, and grows many in his Vancouver greenhouse. The garden project of Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly becomes a manifestation of an artistic project initiated by Mike MacDonald in 1991, a complex matrix of interventions which both closely relate to the various specific contexts in which they manifest and now extend from coast to coast. Each garden thus articulates two different temporalities: the here and now of the individual project, which dictates the selection of plants and flowers, and the broader artistic project which spans years and territories and encompasses the intricate network of the artist's encounters and interactions. The garden projects thus present responses to both their immediate context and to the wider nexus of events, of local, national or international significance, which have shaped the artist's wider garden project as they have punctuated his performance in time and space. Playing on the predominance of landscapes in the history of art, these artists go beyond mere representation to make nature - the real - reappear in a cultural context, signalling the total entanglement of representation and the real, of technology and nature. Their projects require technological intervention and close monitoring. Nature and technology, the born and the made, are shown to be inextricably intertwined, and the myth of nature so central to Western civilization is undermined. |
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