Watcher

2007
Video installation
Media: 4 houses, 10 projectors & DVD players, rear-projection screens
Dimensions: 2 city blocks
Duration: 5-10 min. loops

Watcher is a multi-building video installation. Viewed on the windows of a series of houses, some of which I inhabited during childhood, images from my memories of growing up on D’Arcy Street in Toronto merge with imagined stories that have occurred behind the buildings’ facades over the course of the area’s complex history; fact is peppered with fiction. The work is tinged with sadness as it deals with personal loss and the melancholy of inevitable change in any place. Continuity within change is conveyed through the quotidian, everyday gestures and activities of the characters, forming a link to the distant past and to the future.

As viewers walk from house to house, they become implicated as voyeurs in the human compulsion to not mind our own business. In turn the shadowy inhabitants of the houses recurrently pause during their quotidian activities to watch over the street.