Annie MacDonell: Not So Black and White

In “Flatness, Light, Black & White,” Annie MacDonell presented eight modestly sized black-and-white photographs. Each of the images was a digital collage of high-contrast photographs taken by the artist at a barbershop over the course of an afternoon. In reconfiguring the original images, the barbershop—itself a site of editing and altering appearances—becomes a non-linear space. Its architecture and decor are used as splicing points; the archways, decorative columns, mirrors, mouldings and baseboards become frames that MacDonell fills or layers with images of other elements of the space, creating a series of perspectival junctures and blurring any distinct lines between production, post-production and presentation.

Under her orchestration, the rich pattern, line and texture of the barbershop—its stripes and polka dots—overlap and blend into optical and spatial ambiguities. The walls of the space, while still remaining distinct, seem to hold the capacity to be vector paths for digital modelling; the very specificities that make the site recognizable as a traditional barbershop also make it a series of mutable planes for MacDonell to manipulate.

As is the case with much of MacDonell’s work, she presented an austere, deceptively simple product, which, when examined, doubled back into a nebulous, self-reflexive meditation on issues now at the head of contemporary visual culture. In the show, the work only begins in depicting a physical space—the barbershop—and in documenting the events taking place there. Then, through MacDonell’s process of manipulation and layering, they give way to a broader reflection on the fragmentary nature of seeing in a world pervaded by endless digital images.

The photographs chart the formal properties of the digital image as an abstract entity, exploring permeability, the incorporation of multiple perspectives and compression. These elements conspire to flatten not only our interaction with images but also our experience of the world around us. They replace the textured notion of organic wholeness for a more consistent, yet splintered and dissociative, fullness.

MacDonell’s images act as a crucible for these concerns. As an audience we read the works as photographs, despite their evident construction; as an artist she understands we are used to receiving layered information and viewing from multiple perspectives simultaneously. For MacDonell, these photographs, despite their paper supports in the gallery setting, are not finite entities. They are representative of just a few of the innumerable, ever-mutable possibilities of an image in a digital age.

This is a review from the Spring 2014 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, visit its table of contents. To read the entire issue, pick up a copy on newsstands or the App Store until June 15.