Euan Macdonald
"Euan Macdonald" by Jennifer McMackon, Winter 2006, p. 90
Euan Macdonald’s exhibition at Birch Libralato, “Where Flamingos Fly,” featured a video of the same name playing continuously on a monitor in the back gallery. In it, accompanied by an ambient progression of tinkling ivories, the artist shuffled a stack of 50-year-old sheet music such that the front cover of each successive Gershwin or Irving Fields or Cole Porter tune made an awkward cameo appearance.
This ad hoc method of narrative construction was Dylanesque but the resulting patois was pure Macdonald. Nostalgic titles such as Fogbound, Call Me and There Will Never Be Another You were proffered to the camera in a plodding hand-held stream. Kennedy and Spoliansky’s Where Flamingos Fly broke the croupier’s cadence with a pause; then the shuffling resumed and, having exposed the contents of each song sheet, the artist made his exit and the video began again.
The video piece functioned as a kind of engine, spinning a web of pale connective fibres to an array of mostly graphite drawings hung salon-style on the walls. The drawings came in various middling shapes and sizes. Many were small diptychs that paired careful replicas of selected song titles from the video with often surprising pictorial corollaries from Macdonald’s own imagination.
Some of these were wryly humorous, like the three lumpen shadows accompanying Where Flamingos Fly and the errant tumbleweed presented in tandem with Soon. But other images were strangely touching, such as the mate for All Through the Night, in which the high beams of a speeding (getaway?) car pierced a velvety black midnight terrain. In these drawings Macdonald seemed to have coaxed a wistful sadness out of his pencil lead, creating a wonderful dark limit to the emotional spectrum of his hit parade.
The back gallery was ideal for this terrific suspension of sauce and sorrow. The interplay of ideas and images was successful not only due to the sheer saturation and density of the presentation, but also by virtue of the empathy that arose from the obvious presence of the artist’s hand in the works themselves. In both the video and the drawings, Macdonald explored his project with a genuine tactility, evident as much in his handling of the sheet music before the camera as in the pressure exerted by his pencil in the drawings. The distillation ran a little thinner in the front gallery, where a smattering of comparatively large, overtly fabricated works (comprising only about a fifth of the entire exhibition) appeared to have fallen out of Macdonald’s twinkly handspun orbit—landing with less sparkle in more space.
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