Brianna McDonald’s Fall Idea Board, 2023, paper and pencil. Courtesy of Brianna McDonald.
Meet Brianna McDonald, an artist who has embarked on a creative journey that fuses personal narratives with elements of pop culture. With a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Concentration in Drawing from Texas State University in 2020. Currently, Brianna is pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). I first met Brianna while I was enrolled in the Master’s of Art History program at UTSA. Her artistic aesthetic is a captivating, collaged, blend of personal storytelling and popular culture. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to truly understand an artist is by visiting their studio, and when Brianna invited me into hers, I was excited to witness her creative process firsthand.
Christopher Karr (CK): How did you start as an artist?
Brianna McDonald (BM): I took art in high school. I went to a very small town and a small high school. It was a majority-minority high school, in rural Lytle, Texas. They didn’t offer art until you got to high school. I didn’t touch paints until I got to college.
I got to college and realized I had to get a real job. I ended up hating everything that I tried to make myself do, and I got back into art. And because I was only familiar with drawing, that’s what my undergraduate concentration ended up being. But during undergrad, I finally got to work with paints like watercolors so that helped me branch out. By the end of undergrad, I was working a lot with collage and elements of pop-culture and that’s where I came into the MFA program here at UTSA.
CK: How did you get into collaging? Were you inspired by any artists or did it just happen?
BM: It was very intrinsically motivated. I liked being creative and expressing myself formally and aesthetically by forming and arranging things.
Brianna McDonald, “Hold Your Breath,” 2023, mixed media, plastic, photographs, thread, 48 x 33 inches. Courtesy of Brianna McDonald.
CK: Do you have any artworks that you want to discuss?
BM: Yes. This is Hold your Breath. So, this is the first time that I started going towards using an object and deconstructing an object with my collages instead of doing something 2-Dimensional and flat. I cut apart this pool floaty, and included a lot of pictures of mouths and hands holding people down. I like how the plastic is cheap, but also shiny. It draws you in. I really like to play between high and low materials. So have these shiny silver teeth surrounded by hot pink. And then there’s the plastic, with all these random neon colors throughout.
Brianna McDonald, “Boot-Cut,” 2023, mixed media, fabric photographs, thread, ink, 35 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Brianna McDonald.
CK: Can you tell me a bit about your Texas?
BM: Absolutely. So, this is my Texas. I started thinking about what Texas is, and the fakeness about what it is. People have this idea of what Texas is or isn’t. This artwork combines watercolor painting, printed photographs of boots, and jeans.
CK: It’s not the actual shape of Texas.
BM: No, it’s not. The collage is really a wonky caricature of what Texas is. It almost doesn’t make sense. I included actual jeans sewn onto images of boots. I wanted to show all these stereotypes that people have about Texas as this sort of Western thing.
Brianna McDonald. “She Sees You When You're Sleeping.” 2023, multimedia video installation, 64 x 55 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Brianna McDonald.
CK: Talk about your Lo-fi Girl.
BM: Part of this artwork involves me setting up a projector. And the live chat feed of the Lo-Fi Girl is what I project over my canvas and bed. When I started to create this, I was thinking about how Lo-fi girl has become this canon thing to us culturally. Almost everybody has seen, or heard of, or listened to, Lo-fi Girl at some point.
CK: So, who or what is Lo-Fi Girl to you?
BM: I was listening to her one night while doing work in my room. I forgot to turn her off and I fell asleep. There was a surrealness to this girl watching over me the whole night. And I wanted to deconstruct that setting. So, I have this bed protruding from the wall. But also, I include that live chat because at any given point in time, there are thousands of people listening to her.
CK: Why is Lo-Fi Girl iconic to you?
BM: Lo-fi girl was initially created by an artist to accompany easy-going playlists. What I mean by that is music that has no vocals and is something you can work to or study to. So, this long playlist was made on YouTube and so many people started listening to it, which became this aesthetic brand. Eventually, Lo-fi Girl became a live channel that streams every single day and the playlist is constantly evolving. She exists on this plane that’s different from ours. Whenever it’s night time here, it’s broad daylight for her.
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