Mike MacDonald: Touched by the Tears of A Butterfly

Featuring a dynamic art installation by Mi’kmaw artist Mike MacDonald (1941 – 2006), this iteration of our Multipurpose Room provides an immersive, low-sensory space.
Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly is a silent video that features a monarch butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, followed by a montage of butterflies pollinating various flora and fauna.
Mike MacDonald created a series of medicinal gardens across Turtle Island. These gardens were designed to nurture the relationship between butterflies and the plants they pollinate, in spaces where Indigenous plants are impacted by industrialization.
About the Artist
Born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Mike MacDonald was of Mi’kmaw ancestry. Mike drove across Canada every year working as a video installation artist and gardener in addition to pursuing photography and new media projects. Self-taught, he focused on the environment, incorporating plants and animals in his artworks. He found inspiration in both his Indigenous ancestry and Western sources, drawing from science as well as traditional medicine and ethnobotany.
His works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide, at such venues as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Heard Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), and the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris, France). In 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Jack and Doris Shadbolt Prize from the Vancouver Institute for Visual Arts, and in 2000 he received the first Aboriginal Achievement Award for New Media presented at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Mike’s careful, positive storytelling, as well as his tender regard for nature and the quiet goings-on of the butterfly, built him a reputation as one of the more significant contemporary artists in Canada.