“Singing in Dark Time: Martha McDonald, Music for Modernist Shapes”
“Singing in Dark Time: Martha McDonald, Music for Modernist Shapes”
by Kaitlin Pomerantz | Title Magazine
February 11, 2019
Philadelphia performance-based artist Martha McDonald makes work that mines the present to confront history, offering it up for consideration, memorialization, and revisitation. McDonald often uses site as a jumping-off point, with projects taking place in repositories of memory around the world, including historic house museums, gardens, archives, libraries, and even a dump. In a previous Philadelphia performance, Martha McDonald, in a hard hat, fluorescent vest, and dusty white uniform, ambled atop piles of construction rubble in line to be sorted at Revolution Recovery waste management center, belting sea shanties and other traditional songs of memory and longing into a walkie talkie and megaphone before a live audience. Using her great strength as a performer and artist, McDonald makes forgotten objects and overlooked places function fluidly as portals to the past; enchanting, complicating, and enriching our awareness of the present.