Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly

Mike MacDonald's video installation Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly is the fourth in a series of installations this artist has produced over the past ten years. As with the other three, this work is a simple and direct presentation in the passive defence of ecologies. Unlike the other three, this installation utilizes a single video image, thus transforming the grid which marked the earlier work, as well as employing external elements in its realization. Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly consists of seven rocking chairs, each a different colour and placed before a silk scrim that flutters in the breeze of an air ionizer. The viewer is invited to sit in one of the chairs to watch the fourteen minute video of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis and preparing to fly and images of different butterflies feeding—all shot in Quebec and the Maritimes. The quiet ambient simplicity of the earlier work is still present, yet a transformation takes place before our eyes. The simple beauty of these few shots speaks directly to what has been lost, while the intrusion of the technology slips away unnoticed. Mike MacDonald, in a process not unlike his subject, transcends the contradictions as he issues quiet warnings of our peril.