The Sublime as Rupture: In conversation with Annie MacDonell

When I first reached out to visual artist and filmmaker Annie MacDonell for an interview for BlackFlash, I thought our conversation would orbit a single project: “The Beyond Within” (2023), an exhibition that took the psychedelic experience as its subject. I had worked as Annie’s research assistant when she was developing the project, and was closely involved in tracing some of the archival materials that shaped it—most notable to me were the psychedelic trial reports produced at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. At the time, supported by North America’s first democratically elected socialist government, the province stood at the forefront of global psychedelic research. Researchers at Weyburn pioneered guided LSD therapy as an alternative to long-term psychiatric hospitalization; a radical approach which aligned closely with the ambitions of an emerging public health system. 

Annie’s interest in psychedelics was as a metaphor for the expansion of consciousness beyond the contemporary powers which rule daily life. Throughout our conversation, “The Beyond Within” ended up becoming a point of entry into much larger questions driving her work—about capitalism and imagination, rupture and continuity, belief and disillusionment, and the stubborn, unruly persistence of art itself. 

We spoke about her newest film, One Equal Light (2025), her collaborations with filmmaker Maïder Fortuné, and the feminist working group which she helped form, EMILIA-AMALIA. Threaded throughout was an insistence on art’s continued relevance, even—especially—amid institutional failure and political crisis. As we spoke about censorship, donor power, and the widening gap between artists and the structures that claim to support them, the question of belief kept resurfacing. What does it mean to remain unjaded when the conditions for making and showing work feel increasingly compromised? How do collective practices help sustain that belief when individual resolve falters? In discussing these overlapping registers, Annie offers openings: moments where the expected briefly loosens its grip, and other ways of imagining art, relation and being begin to emerge.

Lodoe Laura (LL): “The Beyond Within” is an exhibition—mounted at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, SFU Galleries, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and Illingworth Kerr Gallery—centered around the psychedelic experience. Can you introduce us to this project? What sparked your interest in psychedelics?

Annie MacDonell (AM): “The Beyond Within” is an exhibition of recent solo work and collaborative films made with Maïder Fortuné. The show was curated by Crystal Mowry and Leila Timmins.  As you said, each of the works has some sort of psychedelic tie-in. The two films in the show (Communicating Vessels and OUTHERE [for Lee Lozano]) both feature acid trips, albeit in very different forms. And the main installation work in the show is specifically about the history of psychedelics as research and therapy. 

When I was making that installation work, I was always thinking about psychedelics as a metaphor for something else. I wanted to talk about the hold that capitalism has over our imaginations, and by extension, our sense of what is possible, and I thought that psychedelics might be a way to do that. The intersection of the two things came from an article I read in which patients described their therapeutic psychedelic trips. Almost everyone in it talked about sudden feelings of connectedness to the world, to the planet, to people they love and people they’ve never met, to the past and future of humanity. It occurred to me that these feelings they were describing were the exact opposite of how capitalism needs us to experience the world. This was interesting to me, and so I started to research what exactly psychedelics do to the brain. There’s a specific part of the brain that’s shut down on psychedelics, a neural network called the Default Mode Network, which is also sometimes referred to as the seat of the ego. It seems that when we shut down the ego, we shut down our sense of ourselves as disconnected individuals, and then a whole range of other ideas, emotions and images become accessible. My interest in psychedelics was actually a sort of trippy thought experiment into what human experience could be if we could dissolve the boundaries of the self, even just for long enough to imagine a different way of being in relation to the world and each other.   

LL: In the exhibition, you include pages from psychedelic trial reports produced at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan in the 1950s, where researchers tried to document the perceptual effects of LSD, using guided sessions as alternatives to prolonged psychiatric hospitalization. What emerged for you from reading and working with these archival materials?

AM: I wanted to ground the show in the earliest experiments in psychedelics, which began in the fifties in Saskatchewan. Those pages come from a manual titled LSO-25 Protocols, which was produced at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in 1952. It documents patient experiences through long interviews and drawings, and it also lays out best practices for the doctors, who were still trying to figure out how to guide the patients through these experiences. What’s interesting about this manual is that it documents a version of psychedelic experience that precedes the one we know so well from the late 1960s. The drugs have not yet entered either the Western mainstream or the counterculture. There is no consensus around whether they are good or bad, no existing language to describe the experience, no politics or policies associated with them. Reading the documents, you sense that both the doctors and patients are moving into an unknown territory. 

The best part of the manual is the beautiful line drawings made by the patients as they struggle to describe their visual hallucinations. They show all kinds of mundane things made wonderful: a cat’s mouth overflowing with teeth, a rug turning into quicksand, a ceiling that drips jewels, and a nurse with 3 faces. I love the porousness between reality and dream in these images and the way they crack the known world open to other possibilities. But I especially love their simplicity and artlessness, and how they have nothing to do with the tie-dye and dancing bears that we normally associate with psychedelics. In the installation, I reproduce the manual pages at poster scale, marking them up with pink marker to highlight certain passages. I also animated the line drawings in the installation’s videos, and used excerpts of the patient transcriptions in the videos’ voice-overs. 

LL: Yes, I love the patient’s drawings too–they’re these simple line figures and forms which leave so much space between the experience and its representation. Another video work from “The Beyond Within” that addresses the psychedelic experience is OUTHERE (for Lee Lozano). The video takes as a point of departure a 1971 lecture that American artist Lee Lozano gave at NSCAD art college, called “The Halifax 3 State Experiment,” which Lozano delivers in three states–sober, stoned on weed, and high on LSD. But then you and your collaborator, Maïder Fortuné, go beyond this event, taking a deeper look at Lozano’s work and life. You even have a birth chart made for her. I’m curious what compelled you so much about this person and her practice.

AM: We are always interested in the figures who exist in the margins, people who can’t or won’t function within the prescribed rules, especially when they are artists. The character “E” in Communicating Vessels plays that role, and Lee Lozano definitely belongs to that category as well. Lozano was an artist who abandoned her painting practice in the late 1960s and began a series of social, sexual and substance-based experiments that she carefully documented in her private notebooks. Occasionally, she exhibited the notes as works on paper in the gallery, but mostly she just lived the experiences and kept the records. She was doing all of this at a time when art was being turned inside out by conceptual art, performance art and video art, all of which had big influences on her. It was a time when everything and anything could be reframed as an artwork, and Lozano took that shift dead seriously. This talk she gave at NSCAD is a perfect example. Instead of the usual artist’s talk, she delivered a wild, open-ended, day-long event that tested the patience of the audience and the rules of the school. But “The Halifax 3 State Experiment” also had all the hallmarks of a conceptual artwork. It had an announced structure, it was iterative, and it was shaped by an idea, rather than a subject. That combination of total rigour and a sort of belligerent refusal to follow the rules was perfectly representative of who she was as a person. In the film, we take the talk as a point of departure, and then, through writing, performance, and an interview with an astrologer, we try to unpack who she was as an artist. She really was a wild and unpredictable figure, but she was also someone who was one hundred percent dedicated to her practice and to the process of
making art. 

One of the things that Maïder and I share is a completely uncynical belief in the potential of art. It’s a hard position to maintain, and we are often disappointed by the art world itself. But all of that has nothing to do with the actual work of making art, or the experience of encountering the best artworks as a viewer. In a secular world, it’s one of the last meaningful social experiences, and one of the few ways to access the sublime or a feeling of transcendence or transformation. Religions have their heretics and saints who remind others of what belief makes possible. In a secular art world, it’s the outsider geniuses and deliberate misfits that help us understand what is possible when you push all the garbage aside. 

LL: Do you feel comfortable naming some of the disappointments you’ve confronted while navigating the art world? How do you maintain your uncynical belief in the power of art despite these encounters? 

AM: Oh wow. That’s a big question. I mean, there are a lot of problems in the art world, and most of them are easy to brush away when you’re busy with what you’re making and surrounded by good people. But there are also the bigger, systemic issues, which have become much more apparent since Gaza. 

The systemic problems inside the art world are exactly the same as the problems outside of it, which is that there’s a huge gap between the people with power and the rest of us. In art, the big donors, the collectors and board members, the gallery CEOs, they’re all very far removed from the artists and art workers at the bottom of the food chain. To them, the art world is just a big, fancy machine that serves to achieve other purposes altogether. It’s always been like that, but the political division over the genocide in Gaza has made this reality painfully clear. The outrageous firings, the open censorship, the loss of shows and funding for those who don’t comply— it’s been chilling and disheartening, especially if you’re someone who thought of the art world as a place of progressive politics, transgression, free expression. We know now that’s not what it is. 

So why continue to believe in art? I don’t know. Because we keep at it, I guess. Because we can’t stop making it, seeking it out, talking about it, even as all the structures are pulled out from under us. Because no matter what they do, art will keep bubbling up, like a beautiful and uncontrollable thing they can never eradicate. 

LL: Yes. I’ve felt the chasm between the ethics and ideas of the artists, and the realities of the administrations and institutions of display, and fell into despair at its depths a few times. And I know I’m not alone. You’re a part of the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA, which recently held an Open Hearing event subtitled “Dreaming in Dark Times,” which opened a space for people involved in the Toronto arts sector and its ecosystems to contribute their struggles, triumphs and imaginings. What did you learn from this exercise?

AM: We held “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” in March of 2024, just a few months after Trump’s re-election, when things were feeling very dark. EMILIA-AMALIA invited the Toronto art community to get together and talk about where we were at and what needed to be done to build a better future for arts workers. The structure was based on an event put on by the Art Workers Coalition in New York in 1969. It was really just a basic town hall format: anyone could speak, everyone had four minutes, no questions or rebuttals. And it worked really well. Almost 200 people showed up, and we spent an afternoon and evening hearing each other out. 

What we learned is that arts workers are really not feeling good right now. People are tired and disillusioned. They’re worried about their own futures, about the future of their communities, and about the survival of the big and small institutions that have sustained us up until now, however imperfectly. But the event was also a reminder that a lot of us still care for each other and for the things that art permits us to do together. We didn’t come away with any clear steps forward or easy solutions. There were too many different experiences and opinions to lead to that. But I think at that moment, people needed to be together in a space, hearing each other speak in order to take measure of where we were at. Everything’s happening so fast right now that sometimes all you can hope to do is momentarily focus your attention to get your head around it. Open Hearing allowed us to do that.

LL: This collectivity seems important to your practice. You often work collaboratively with Maïder Fortuné. How did this partnership develop? Can you talk about your process and interest in working together?

AM: Maïder and I went to grad school together in the early 2000s and became very good friends through that experience. We had come out of very different arts educations, and we clicked immediately because we had so many things to share and exchange. It was only about ten years into our friendship that we started making work together. We began collaborating at a time when we were both interested in exploring more narrative forms of filmmaking, and I think it was less intimidating to move in that direction together. We share a lot of the same influences and ideas, and we know each other so well. We grew up as artists together, basically. So our collaboration is an extension of that history and friendship. Sometimes this makes things complicated, but it’s also been incredibly sustaining and productive for both of us. Even now, I think working together permits us to take risks and try things we might not do on our own. 

LL: Talk to me about your turn towards writing and working with the moving image. Was this a conscious shift?

AM: Film and video have always been a big part of my practice. Even when I was studying photography as an undergrad, I was shooting 16mm film from the very beginning. Maïder made a move from theatre and performance to video during our time at Le Fresnoy together, and she has primarily been making video since then. The transition we made together actually had more to do with writing. We were both making moving-image work that was primarily visual and mostly non-narrative, works that were usually shown as installation in the gallery. It was only when we started working together that we began to write scripts, imagine characters and think about narrative in a more intentional way. 

LL: One Equal Light, your most recent film project with Maïder, extends your ongoing interests in outsider figures and the sublime as a rupture within everyday experience. Could you discuss the genesis and conceptual framework behind the work?

AM: In December, we finished One Equal Light, which is the first part in a bigger film project that we’ve been working on for a couple of years. One Equal Light is an introduction or prologue to the rest. It’s about the 2024 solar eclipse, ghosts, death, birth, and the English poet and preacher John Donne. Donne is another one of those odd outsider figures. He was a shape-shifting poet genius who lived an unpredictable life in a time of major political turmoil. He’s the main ghost that haunts the film, but there are others as well. 

The next part of the film, which we are working on now, deals more explicitly with the messy intersection of artists and politics by way of reenactments of the original 1969 Open Hearing event, which happened in New York. But One Equal Light sets the stage for those future parts by showing a world spinning off its axis momentarily in 2024. The eclipse is a way to demonstrate, like you said, the way that the sublime can rupture the everyday. An eclipse is a very specific kind of rupture, one that people experience as profound and magical, but also unnerving. Coming to terms with the experience of rupture seems very important right now. So much is changing all at once. So many of our ways of living, our social structures and systems are falling away, and other new and unknown things are coming up to take their place. It’s a time of endings and beginnings, which also means it’s a time of ghosts and monsters. It’s almost too much to get your head around in your day-to-day life, but with One Equal Light, we’re trying to represent something about the daily seismic shifts of contemporary life. 

LL: How do these ideas–rupture, continuity, historical echo–shape the formal decisions you make in your work?

AM: Those three things are incredibly important to the formal decisions I make, especially in the film works. What has always excited me about film is its capacity to incorporate both rupture and continuity. Films are these beautiful, hyper-flexible containers that can accommodate all kinds of material—moving images, still images, sound, voice, text, music. But for all its flexibility, the container also has its linear shape. Films move forward through time. They have to have their beginnings, middles, and ends. And because viewers also bring expectations of narrative development or continuity to them, they become an excellent form in which to set off dynamic breaks. 

Rupture might be especially important to One Equal Light. It uses fast cuts and densely layered images to reproduce the feeling of being alive right now. It is filled with ghosts and historical echoes, but it’s also very contemporary in its accelerated rhythms and the density of the information it puts out there. 

LL: As you trace these seismic shifts of contemporary life, you repeatedly turn to historical moments and figures as reference points—the Open Hearing, solar eclipses, Lee Lozano, psychedelic trials, John Donne. What does this backward-looking gaze open up for you? Do the shifts unfolding now feel distinct from those that came before? 

AM: In some ways, what’s happening in the present is distinct from the past. The speed and scale of the current shifts are, I think, unprecedented. But they are also repeating known patterns shaped by the exact same racism, imperialism, and greed that formed the historical foundation of capitalism. 

When I am looking to the past in my work, it’s always from a desire to find answers about the present. The present can sometimes be hard for me to read. I’m always trying, but sometimes it’s too close or too immediate, or it’s moving too fast to be fully legible. The distance we have from the past allows us to assess it and learn from it, and that can be useful in turn for understanding the present. 

When we first began to work as EMILIA-AMALIA, we used to speak about “the undetonated potential of the past,” by which we meant that we were interested in unearthing potentially explosive events, or figures, or artworks from the past in order to set off new events in the present. I think that desire runs throughout all my work: To find the powerful or mind-altering or generative things from the past and use them to create ruptures in the present. But always at the root of this is the desire to make new and better futures possible.

Lodoe Laura’s writing has been featured in BlackFlash, C Magazine, Esse arts + opinions, IMPULSE, Peripheral Reviewand Public Parking. She spent several years working in archives, galleries, museums and artist-run spaces. Lodoe currently lives in Toronto’s west end, where she teaches classes focused on embodied movement and practices acupuncture. 

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working in film, photography and installation. Recent shows include “Interior Life” at 272 Gallery in Toronto, and “Shadow Vision,” with Maïder Fortuné, at Dazibao in Montreal. “One Equal Light,” her new film made with Maïder Fortuné, will premiere at Cinema du Réel in Paris in March 2026 and their other collaborative films will be screened at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in April 2026. She lives in Toronto with her family, and teaches at TMU’s School of Image Arts. 

This article is published in issue 43.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue