Web site launch: Screen Kiss

For Immediate Release

Its spring time in New York and love is in the air. It's also time for Jillian Mcdonald's digital cinematic sequel to Me and Billy Bob, 'Screen Kiss' to be launched.

Responding initially to the powerful anesthesia of the American dream, promoted and sustained by the technologies of spectacle, illusion and simulation available to it, 'Screen Kiss' is about North American celebrity and the artist's object of desire, actor, Billy Bob Thornton.

Responding to and extending Mcdonald's earlier Billy Bob-centered work, meandbillybob.com, in which mere fandom erupted almost into erotomania, the digitally manifested emotional and physical pas de deux between herself and her illusory lover is a fantasy further into the fictional; here, she imagines and digitally actualizes physical relationships with other heart-throb stars who have been similarly inscribed by the media with immense erotic capital and who thus have immense social mobility. 'Screen Kiss' is a gaze within a gaze and the romantic adventures of the artist with Johnny Depp, Billy Crudup, Daniel Day Lewis, Vincent Gallo and others.

Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist living in New York. She says, "In my media work, I am interested in non-linear narrative, pop-culture, confusion, and poetics."

'Screen Kiss' is one in a series of new, commissioned projects from Soil Digital Media Suite in the Cache-Cachet series. It will be on view as an installation at Neutral Ground gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, August, 2005. Funding support generously acknowledged from the Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association (SMPIA).


http://www.soilmedia.org/Screen_Kiss/