Rear Window Cinema: Letters from Isolation

What can community-focused, site-specific media exhibition look like during a pandemic? How can the social intimacy that has always been a part of artists’ cinema adapt to the context of physical distancing?

Rear Window Cinema transforms artists’ private windows (domestic and studio spaces) into ephemeral screens for rear-window projections that are externally visible to passersby on the street. Between the months of October and December, animation artists will display animated letters to their neighbourhoods, using their windows as the creative point of departure and eventual surface for projection.

Instead of inviting spectators or visitors, Rear Window Cinema invites local residents and passersby, who may chance upon these personal, animated poems on a walk through the neighbourhood. The project will unfold in a cascading series of waves, with each group of artists passing along experiences and insights to the next group.

Between Oct. 30 and Nov. 5, from 7pm to 7:30pm, you can find works by Kat Morris and Josh Neu in Mount Pleasant (East 8th + McLean: visit the NW corner and look around) and Downtown (Helmcken + Seymour: look up at fifth-floor windows in the alley between Seymour and Granville). If you find yourself in those neighbourhoods, go for an evening walk and experience the window as a private-public urban display surface.

Follow the project and all exhibition site updates on Instagram at @rear_windowcinema, and tag us if you chance upon any of the works!

Rear Window Cinema is a partnership project between ECUAD faculty Alla Gadassik, VIVO Media Arts, and flavourcel animation collective, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.