shona macdonald

Chicago Sun-Times (Weekend Section)
Friday, April 26, 2002
Review (excerpt)

Beyond the horizon—
Artists venture outside the box for fresh look at landscape
By Margaret Hawkins, local free-lance writer

The physical body and the land around us seem to be the two constants in art that just won't go away, and who would want them to? Two new shows revisit these themes and manage to find fresh ways to look at these eternal preoccupations.

Topography is the more risk-taking of the two shows, combining works by five emerging artists who work in unconventional media to comment on landscape. Like tourists who venture off the beaten path for a more authentic travel experience, the best artists in this show seem to be looking beyond the obvious or the beautiful in landscape for the inspiration that we take from pure, untrammeled nature...

...Shona Macdonald’s maps of make-believe places also call up romantic ideas of travel and faraway lands in the slightly ironic vernacular of 21st century art. Her smudgy maps are drawn in pencil and ink with bits of newspaper cutouts glued on. The maps identify weather systems, landmarks, roads and rivers, but also no known locale. They are loaded with information but without a key. Like Estep and Baur, Macdonald longs for the hidden, the obscure and the unknown, looking for an outpost of something that is fast disappearing from this earth...

©2002 Margaret Hawkins