Wake Windows: The Witching Hour

Led by a rebellious AI Chatbot, this interactive online exhibition guides viewers through interactive and time-based art by artists who are parents, caregivers, or educators who engage with public databases and “living archives.” In touching on maternal world building and our ever-evolving relationship with AI, Wake Windows: The Witching Hour intends to make visible the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the often invisible labour that is mothering. From animations to machinimas or virtual reality (VR) to interactive narratives, the digital exhibition traces how the artists’ creative outputs have shifted since taking on this care work. Curated by Rea McNamara, participating artists and collaborators include Claudia Cornwall, Alejandra Higuera with Magnolia Higuera, Faith Holland with Ben Bogart and Hildegard Holland Watter, Wednesday Kim, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Rory Scott, Skawennati, and Rodell Warner. Wake Windows is part of a series of digital exhibitions created through the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL)—a newly developed resource championing the development of art exhibitions for digital platforms.

Join us for the virtual opening on 9 May 2024 from 4 PM CST – 5 PM CST.

This project is made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund.

Rea McNamara is a writer and curator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her curatorial work has long been shaped by networked counterpublics’ participatory cultures, particularly the collaborative processes of transformative fandom, alongside a social practice shaped by organizing community-based art initiatives. In her research, she often focuses on the emergence of otherness and hybridity within digital identity formations, informing an on/offline curatorial approach that connects and capacity-builds.

McNamara has previously held curatorial and public programming positions with the Gardiner Museum and Drake Hotel, and been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She has curated and organized a range of exhibitions and public projects, including dis-ease (Vector Festival, 2021), Obsessive Pop Tendencies (Pleasure Dome, 2019), Community Arts Space (Gardiner Museum, 2016-2019), and Safe Space (Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2024). In 2011, she founded the art party series Sheroes, which engaged with female celebrity fandom through music, performance, installation, and internet-based art. Her work has been presented at The Art Gallery of Ontario and is in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection.

Additionally, McNamara has written about art, culture and the internet for frieze, Art in America, The Globe and Mail, and been commissioned to write exhibition texts for Trinity Square Video, the Remai Modern, and Daniel Faria Gallery. From 2020-2021, she was the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators with Hyperallergic. She also gives talks, moderates panels, and lead workshops on fandom, curatorial practice, and the labour of mothering for The Toronto Public Library, Toronto Metropolitan University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and more.

Alejandra Higuera (she/her) is a queer multidisciplinary, visual storyteller focusing on video, illustration, animation, embroidery, and projection. Her work focuses on themes of migration, feminism, memory, grief, and ritual. She is committed to creating spaces for dialogue about the complexities of our experiences that celebrate our differences. Further, as a mother/artist, she understands that she is learning from her child as much as she is teaching her. Higuera has received grants and residencies from the Ontario Arts Council, MOTHRA, and SummerWorks Lab. Her work has been presented by the Regent Park Film Festival, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, the Latino Canadian Cultural Association, and TO Live.

Magnolia Higuera is a 7-year-old kid who loves adventures, nature, and being creative. Sometimes she dances, sometimes she draws, and sometimes she sings; above all she loves playing: making worlds with rocks, empty toilet paper rolls, or just with a marker and paper. Magnolia collaborates with her mamá Alejandra Higuera making videos, gifs, installations, songs, and rugs.

Claudia Cornwall is the author of seven books in a variety of genres. Her 1982 children’s book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, was one of the earliest computer fiction works in Canadian children’s literature. Since Print-Outs, Cornwall has written Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family’s Jewish Past, which won the 1996 B.C. Book Prize for non-fiction. At the World’s Edge: Curt Lang’s Vancouver, 1937-1998, was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2011. The American Library Association’s Booklist selected Catching Cancer: The Quest for its Viral & Bacterial Causes as one of the best books of 2013. Her most recent book, British Columbia in Flames: Stories from a Blazing Summer (Harbour Publishing, 2020), was a finalist for the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for historical writing. Cornwall teaches creative writing in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Faith Holland is an artist, curator, critic, and educator whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. She has exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Broadly, and The Observer. She is the recipient of a 2021 New York State Council on the Arts grant. She has presented solo exhibitions with TRANSFER (New York/Miami), L’Unique (Caen, France), and in 2023 presented her first solo exhibition with Microscope Gallery (New York).

Ben Bogart (they/them) is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018.

Hildegard Holland Watter is an emerging preschooler artist who works across performance, drawing, and installation. She performed as part of Faith Holland’s Hard/Soft installation at Spring/Break Art Show New York 2020 and produced a performance-video work for Vicarious Touching, the online version of the exhibition at TRANSFER. She has also exhibited her work at De:Formal Gallery online in Mozilla Hubs and at juniin in Guayas, Ecuador.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, REDCAT, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Seoul Museum of Art. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.

Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His work often explores the intersections of race, nature and technology, drawing on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. His digital animations using archival photography and archival illustration have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at Trinity Square Video. His digital animations using hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants he has encountered throughout his increasingly diasporic life have also been exhibited at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Rodell works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas in the U.S.

Rory Scott is a multidisciplinary artist whose work utilizes animation, extended-reality (AR & VR), and handcrafted means to create emotive environments and re-imagined life. Through both digital and handmade means, Scott explores the ideas of impermanence, the passage of time and the impacts of technology on the evolution of humanity, as well as the important role that patterns play in shaping our personal and collective lives. Her project Impermanence, which began in 2010, is an ongoing documentation of her life and struggle with accepting change and mortality. Through recorded thoughts, sounds and the use of retro sci-fi imagery, her work confronts and reconciles the passage of time by juxtaposing the old with the new.

Skawennati is a visual artist. Her machinimas, still images, textiles and sculptures have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research-creation network based at Concordia University. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal.

Wednesday Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of De:Formal. She is from Seoul, South Korea and is currently based in California. Kim works with analog and digital media, including 3D animation, video, performance, installation, print, and sculpture, with a clusterfuck aesthetic.  Her work is informed by personal experiences and human psychology. She derives imagery from nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and childhood trauma. Furthermore, she portrays the absurdity of information-saturated contemporary life in a surrealist fashion through wordplay, Wikipedia, voyeurism, and witticism.