Excerpt from Shannon Stratton’s essay regarding Anna Lindsay MacDonald’s 2016 solo exhibition, Re: Halcyon Dream:
“Anna Lindsay MacDonald’s work seems to resonate with Soulilliou’s theory of ornament, playing with the idea of appearance and disappearance in the face of technology. Her black and white palette recalls dazzle camouflage, but even more so, predicts a future prevalence of anti-surveillance camouflage, when humans will ‘hide in plain sight’ from facial detection online and IRL through a combination of black and white face paint, severe hair cuts, and other headgear that scrambles the technology meant to capture our likeness for data, observation, and ‘security.’
The work in Re: Halcyon Dream imagines a line of luxury jewelry from the future, where people choose their body ornaments as a means to pass undetected by technology yet still remain visible and distinct to one another–a fascinating future conundrum where both objectives, visibility and invisibility, will be at play simultaneously both online and on the street.”