REGINA, Sask. — The MacKenzie Art Gallery presents Wake Windows: Circle Time, from Oct. 2 to Jan. 17.
This new play-based contemporary art exhibition explores how the labour and care of children and families can be generative for digital literacy and collaborative action, according to the gallery curators.
The title Wake Windows refers to the periods when babies and toddlers are awake before needing a nap or bedtime. The exhibition expands this idea of time beyond caregiving, asking how our experiences of the past, present and future shape our evolving relationship with digital technology.
Rather than simplifying contemporary art for younger audiences, Wake Windows: Circle Time creates opportunities for children and adults to encounter complex ideas together, the gallery states. The child-centred exhibition, curated by Rea McNamara and 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 the artists featured in the exhibition are themselves children, parents, caregivers and educators, and several have collaborated directly with their own children. These relationships become part of the artistic process, creating opportunities for different generations to learn from one another and consider technology, family life and creativity together, the curator explains.
Children today represent the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence as a creative collaborator. As caregivers, educators and elders, how do we prepare youth to see their own curiosity as a superpower? Through interactive prompts and zones designed for creation, watching, and play, Wake Windows does something thoroughly fresh in how it thinks about technology. Rather than casting judgment on new digital tools, it creates an open space to think critically about technology, to consider both its uses and its limitations. The exhibition encourages kids and families to make time to connect with one another and, from there, explore and play with digital tools together while opening up conversations.
Throughout this exhibition, visitors 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 (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.
The exhibition brings together the work of Whitney Blaisdell, Gabo Camnitzer and Peter Rahul in collaboration with students from the Thomson Community School and Thompson Food Collective, Claudia Cornwall with Iain Soder, FASTWÜRMS, Alejandra with Magnolia Higuera, Faith Holland with Hildegard Holland Watter, Skawennati, Rodell Warner, Emilia White and Witthöft and LaTourelle.
For McNamara, Wake Windows is deeply personal. “I am a curator but also the parent of an almost five-year-old daughter. Wake Windows began soon after her birth, driven by a desire to make visible the missing datasets in the often-invisible labour of mothering,” says McNamara.
“Today, I’m proud to have worked alongside artists, educators, kids and families to convene an immersive, offline experience for my daughter and other children that cultivates their curiosity, intuition, and radical imagination. I see this as a necessary and even urgent antidote to technology’s rapid development and increasing complexities.”
