In his essay Responsiveness Testing, Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, London, writes: "Macdonald quietly unsettles the viewers faith about what exactly is - or is not - happening in the picture he or she is looking at.
One of his earliest works, Interval (1997), is a single channel, hand held video of a view from a high-rise building of afternoon traffic passing through two long palm tree shadows on a sunny boulevard in Los Angeles.
First shown in 2011 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, 9,000 Pieces consists of two works with the same name: a single channel HD video that frames both the testing machine and a piano as well as an artists book containing photographs of the surrounding factory environment.
For this project Macdonald produced Take The Dark Out Of The Night Time, an installation of LED architectural lighting on the Arrow Factory rooftop.
By "transplanting the visual language of glitzy, brightly colored lights that adorn contemporary architecture" onto a simple, single story building, "an isolated and insignificant corner of the city is mysteriously accentuated and embellished.