While studying at Rhode Island School of Design, Laurie McDonald became fascinated when she observed a student experimenting with time-delay feedback, a video technique that creates hypnotic visual patterns. The Forth Worth native began working in the new medium and had an epiphany: she realized she could combine all her interests—music, photography, design, dance, and writing—in video. In collaboration with two classmates and an instructor, she formed the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electric Arts, and in 1974, she earned her BFA in film and video.
McDonald’s multidisciplinary background has led to a diverse career. She holds a master's degree in literature from the University of Houston and wrote screenplays, instructional texts, and three books under the pseudonym “Eva Rome.” In addition, she has worked as a graphic designer, photographer, and book cover designer. Since the early 1980s, McDonald garnered awards from various film and video festivals, including the Athens Film and Video Festival (1982), New York City Experimental Video and Film Festival (1986), and Worldfest Houston (1992). Her works have been exhibited at renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
In her early work, McDonald often engaged with image processors and audio synthesizers to create psychedelic visuals that emphasize shape and movement. In Body Images (1973), her body was lit so intensely that its contours appeared as distinctive black lines. As she moved, the imagery resembled a drawing come to life. In 1980, she moved to Houston and became the video project director and curator of the Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), a public access media facility. SWAMP produced a weekly TV show called The Territory, which served as a primary outlet for Houston’s video artists.
During this time, McDonald produced a range of works, avoiding a signature style. She created straightforward documentaries like The World’s Largest: A Tape about Texas (1979), which explores larger-than-life roadside attractions in rural and small towns around Texas, featuring interviews with the designers and locals that capture the state’s fascination with supersized monuments and self-promotion. McDonald also created socially conscious works such as Primetime (1981), a five-minute montage depicting clips of TV violence from dramas, news broadcasts, commercials, and cartoons that showcases guns, explosions, breaking windows, and other forms of destruction. Death of a Lotus (1989) is a visual poem of abstract imagery—moving black plant-like and calligraphic forms on a white background—dedicated to the Chinese students massacred during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. McDonald also created a humorous take on the medium, as seen in Generic Video Art (1982), a parody featuring five different types of video art: conceptual, experimental, punk, pet art, and “state of the art.” In this work, she comedically illustrates the techniques and characteristics of each genre.
Humor has been a constant theme throughout McDonald’s career in video art, serving as an effective way to engage viewers and address personal subjects. While a professional ballerina in the corps de ballet of a Rhode Island ballet company, McDonald faced frustration with her abilities and the physical challenges of dancing. Through video, she was able to enhance her performance onscreen, achieving effects that were impossible in real life. For example, in Minute Waltz, she used a time-lapse recorder to compress a twenty-minute dance into just one minute. In Deux Pieds, she combined footage of her right and left legs from two separate videos to create the illusion of performing impossible physical feats.
The video The Dying Swan (1975) brings together new and old forms of art in McDonald’s humorous take on a classical production. She removes the ballet from its theatrical context and performs it on a frozen lake while wearing a tutu and pointe shoes. The famous 1905 Russian ballet, originally created for Anna Pavlova by choreographer Mikhail Fokine, tells the story of a wounded swan’s struggle against death while emphasizing elegance and emotional expression. However, in the icy setting, McDonald struggles with the choreography. The leaps, turns, and poses become slips, falls, and stumbles in freezing temperatures.
Rather than excellence or supernatural abilities, The Dying Swan captures McDonald’s challenges with dancing on ice, enhancing the themes of pain and woundedness present in the original choreography. Her shaky performance inadvertently resonates with Fokine’s intent. As she collapses onto the icy surface, her mishaps evoke an emotional response from viewers—albeit one of unease rather than admiration. Nevertheless, McDonald’s exaggeration of the difficulties of dance is a comedic exploration of her own perceived shortcomings, allowing her to find humor in the rigors of ballet that few have transcended and only someone with firsthand experience could fully appreciate.
一Kanitra Fletcher