Wake Windows: Circle Time

About the Exhibition

Curated By

Rea McNamara

Organized & Circulated By

MacKenzie Art Gallery

Galleries

RHW, Hill, Rawlinson

A play-based exhibition for children and adults, where you can touch the art.

Wake Windows is an exhibition series exploring how the labour and care of children and families can be generative for digital literacy and collaborative action. Referring to the periods when babies and toddlers are awake before needing a nap or bedtime, Wake Windows expands beyond caregiving to explore how different forms of temporality, which describe ideas of the future and the past, shape our ever-evolving relationship with digital transformation.

The child-centred exhibition, designed by the project-based artist duo Louise Witthöft and Rodney LaTourelle, is conceived as a play-based learning environment. Most of the art is interactive and can be touched and handled. Many of its artists, themselves kids, parents, caregivers, and/or educators, embrace forms of time that are not so straightforward, engaging with critical digital literacy alongside craft traditions and radical pedagogies. Wake Windows asks: with all this data overload, how can we be “awake” and “present” for ourselves and each other?

Throughout this exhibition, you will meet Edgar, an unruly computer from the early computing past. The main character is from Claudia Cornwall’s Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer (Nerve Press, 1982), one of the earliest computer fiction books in Canadian Children’s literature. He was the guide for Wake Windows: The Witching Hour, the 2024 online MacKenzie exhibition. For this in-person iteration, Edgar is back in a story game crafted by Cornwall in collaboration with narrative designer Iain Soder and McNamara. But this time, he is trying to understand what it means to live in today’s hyperconnected, seemingly frictionless world. Can you help him?

Wake Windows features new and existing works by: Whitney Blaisdell, Gabo Camnitzer, and Peter Rahul in collaboration with the Thomson Community School and Thomson Food Collective, FASTWÜRMS, Alejandra Higuera with Magnolia Higuera, Faith Holland with Hildegard Holland Watter, Skawennati, Rodell Warner, and Emilia White in collaboration with SlowPitchSound.

Wake Windows: Circle Time Opening Reception

Join us for the opening of Wake Windows: Circle Time with an evening for the whole family, featuring a performance, hands-on art activities, fun snacks, and an artist-and-curator conversation.

On Thursday, October 1, at 6:30 PM.