Open Windows

Open Windows considers the intrinsic metaphors and variant connotations of the personal desktop interface. Featured works by Zach Blas, Vida Beyer, Ronnie Clarke, and B Wijshijer originate upon or reconstruct this digital location, materially and spatially reconfiguring its familiar parameters. In screen-recorded video and large-scale multi-media installations, the desktop is alternately a medium, a depository, a portal, a stage. Past-tense traces of absent embodiment create a sense of paradoxic proximity and deceptive immediacy, while the intimacy of the encounters these works facilitate is mediated by the partial legibilities and strategic omissions that both impede and invite the viewer’s voyeuristic impulse. These staged and conditional externalizations of personal digital space and the fraught pleasures that they offer gesture to queer theoretical constructions of privacy, temporality, and desire.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.