El Dorado is a collaborative and cross disciplinary installation that situates two artists’ work in direct conversation.  Both bodies of work 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. 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.

For El Dorado, Jillian McDonald shows two video works, and four paintings. Rush is a video with three vertical channels filmed in Dawson City, The Yukon – the landscape is punctuated by figures who turn into gold forms, bursting outwards to shine this gold back into the land. In Gold Pan, the screen very slowly pans along the winding Yukon River from sea to the heart of the gold rush and beyond to the interior, via Google Earth. Charlotte Becket exhibits a new low lying kinetic floor work in several parts that takes a hybrid form of body and landscape.  A cyclical movement is interrupted periodically with rifts and veins of gold, that emerge and retreat again.