A selection from "The Fortune Teller" displayed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012. The "The Fortune Teller" was in the running for the $50,000 Grange Prize, which MacDonell lost.
As I was studying the furtive, hidden, and camouflaged "spiritual" world that Beshir was channeling through her film Faya Dayi, I started to investigate how film, and especially "experimental," and "personal," films, weave this into our world.
I somehow found Annie MacDonell's work (I am familiar with them from previous years, and have critiqued them here and here).
Recently, her approach is to delve further into this netherworld of dark spirituality. I believe this is a progression of her early work on The Fortune Teller.
She participates in a group called The Witch Institute, which presents itself as a "feminist" group. That identity also explains the progression towards witchcraft as a primordial, female-feminist, activity.
The group through which she works is Emilia-Amalia, whose script implies an occult inversion/mirroring - suggesting going across a boundary into a darker, mirrored image. Other than that, it is a crypto-word, where the group presents NO coherent explanation for the name, its choice, its significance, and its meaning.
It does, however, appear to have links to a piece of work - a children's story - by a Spanish author titled: Amalia, Amelia y Emilia. A description of the book identifies these three names, these three characters, as witches:
Amalia: who appears to be a European witch
Emilia: an Asian witch
Amelia: an African witch
The multi-culti world layout is captured nicely! And aren't these harmless little witches just right for a children's story? But, we have to lure those kids young, don't we!
MacDonell makes no reference to this story, and in fact makes no explanation for the name she (her group) gave the group. But, such is the secretive world of the occult.
Still, OUR world is still highly suspicious of these cryptic movements. And for now, they remain underground.
MacDonell's group camouflages these occult symbols with a socio-political "feminist" veneer. But the logical conclusion of "female power" does lead to "female spiritual power," and who better than the witch to manifest that. I think that is the subversive, anti-male, pro-female power of this group of Emilia-Amalia women, who hold seances and other activities to "focus[...] in particular on what has not yet come to be."
I have written about the occult, black magic, in the arts, present even in popular culture like fashion. It is now no longer so subversive, with television shows openly presenting occult-driven films and series.
MacDonell has slowly and carefully crafted her presence into the art/photographic/cinematic world, and is influential. She is, will be, pulling artists who have lost their footing, who have abandoned (this is a long, decades-long, process and is catching up with us furiously) the Christian, God-Centered world.
A lot of her (and her group's) ideas are at their website Emilia-Amalia. And the group is all women. There is controversy that surrounds the founding member Cheyanne Turions, whose "indigenous" claims were recently rejected, and who had to resign from her Simon Fraser University gallery curator position. I believe that is just an aberration, a bluff, and probably the woman showed too much of Emilia-Amalia's crypto-occult, and was kicked out. She certainly continues with her "indigenous" occult.
It seems that the occult is rearing its head above its underground waiting-room. Certainly, the tired defiance of Christianity, with Christianity even succumbing to occult-style indoctrination, is precipitating this.
Perhaps it is a sign of the times, and a time for vigilance and resolution.
This strange woman, with her artless projects and dreary products, is coming out of hiding.
My Reclaiming Beauty project talks about this in its introductory pages, of the ugliness and darkness that will pervade this switch, and which is already happening.
It is shocking to find someone I know who is now clearly part of this "other world."
A recent interview at the AGO here.
