Harvestworks Art and Technology Program presents Jillian McDonald’s artwork Total Eclipse and the Heart, in the exhibition Time Based Art: Space and Time in Tune.
The experimental video Total Eclipse and the Heart is inspired by the solar totality of 2024.
During an eclipse gone wrong, characters are drawn into nature and disappear into oblivion, sinking in ponds and crumbling to dust. The video alternates between live action and footage generated by artificial intelligence. A colossal 3D moon hovers inside and out, asteroids float by, the sun morphs from one strange version to the next, and some scenes display the point of view of mosses, lichens and fungi.
📢 “Total Eclipse and the Heart” By Jillian McDonald
🗓 DATE & TIME: May 17 – Aug 24, 2025. Open to the public: 11 am to 5 pm on Sat and Sun. Opening: Saturday May 17, 2025 from 3 – 5 pm
📍 LOCATION: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Islan
Artist Talk: Saturday August 16, 2025 at 2:30 pm.
Jillian McDonald will speak about her work, Total Eclipse and the Heart (2025), followed by a screening of an updated version. Total Eclipse and the Heart is an experimental video divided into four parts, reflecting the stages of a total solar eclipse. Blending live action with AI-generated imagery based on the artist’s own images, the film follows characters as they dream of the moon, wander into the wild, and vanish into oblivion during a cosmic event gone awry—sinking into ponds and crumbling to dust. A massive moon drifts through both interior and exterior spaces, while asteroids float by and the sun continuously transforms into surreal, unfamiliar forms. The natural world takes center stage, revealing the perspective of mosses, insects, foxes, lichens, walrus, and fungi.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist based in New York, and Professor of Art at Pace University. Her work was exhibited and screened recently at Undercurrent in Brooklyn, the Art Gallery of Regina in Saskatchewan, aCinema in Milwaukee, Deluge Contemporary in Victoria, La Bande Vidéo and AxeNéo7 in Quebec, Philip Steele Gallery in Denver, The Esker Foundation in Calgary, and through Temp Files video collective.
McDonald’s work was profiled in a feature length radio documentary on CBC’s Ideas, and in The New York Times and Canadian Art. She has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and participated in residencies at The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, Wave Farm in Acra, NY, Glenfiddich in Scotland, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Harvestworks in New York.
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