2019 Dawson City International Short Film Festival Program DCISFF_2019_program_web | Page 10

RUSH and GOLD PAN
Video installation by Jillian McDonald
These video works take the history of gold mining and prospecting as a framework
to explore the notion of an ideal, idea, or substance that is elusive and sought after.
Something that is always around us but that we can’t always feel, something subterranean
or dissolved into particles no longer detectable to us – in the way that our oceans hold
trillions of undetectable particles and gold mining histories are filled with fortune and
loss depending on the point of view. In these works, time is slowed down to reveal this
undercurrent. The combination of media re-enforces the structure of parallel and
co-existing realities.
Two video works that each trigger an augmented reality experience. Rush is a video with
three vertical channels that was filmed in Dawson City, Yukon and features twenty-seven
actors. Rivers, mountains, and sites like abandoned mines and ghost towns are embedded
with stories and ghosts. The landscape, altered by over a century of gold mining, is
punctuated by figures who turn into gold forms, bursting outwards to shine this gold back
into the land.
In Gold Pan, the point of view very slowly pans along the winding Yukon River from the
sea to the heart of the Gold Rush and beyond to the interior, via Google Earth. Rare gold
gleams appear, shining in the footage.
Gallery Show sponsored by
8