shona macdonald

Cleveland Free Times
November 22-28, 2000
review (excerpt)

The Untouchables—
There’s Surface Tensions at SPACES
By: Douglas Max Utter

Every work of art is about the materials that comprise it. In visual terms, this means that rough and smooth, blank space and goopy texture define one another as they dance from thin to thick. For this reason, Surface Tensions could be a good title for any show, but it is especially appropriate to the current exhibitions at SPACES. Each of the nine artists concentrates on the strange ratio that the eye calculates when it joins with the cortex to imagine – and bypass – the act of touching…

…Shona Macdonald, a Chicago native who, like Budd, is originally from Scotland, uses strips of commercial envelopes to create works that appear from a slight distance to be complicated, colorful paintings. These abstractions have a tight linear structure that, in Sea of Envelopes, takes on a wavelike motions. Overall, they convey an aura of obsessiveness (another contemporary gambit) that stems from their origin in Macdonald’s irrational hoarding. From another standpoint, they speak of traditionally feminine aesthetic tasks such as weaving, and of the necessary human work of sorting, saving and transforming: finding usefulness and beauty in what blows up against the threshold…

…Surface Tensions, on the whole, is about sensual loss and imperfection, as the interruptions of paint, paper, tape – of materials in general – stand in for the artist and her difficulties. They consciousness on a truth-telling journey toward the surface of those other planets, time and self.

©2000 Douglas Max Utter