PROJECT: Watch List at Other Places Art Fair
Curators: Jennifer Celio, Sean Noyce, Ty Pownall, and Brian Thomas Jones
On view: Feb. 3, 2017
Press release: Durden and Ray presents Watch List, a site-specific installation by artists Jennifer Celio, Sean Noyce, Ty Pownall, and Brian Thomas Jones. The collaborative piece will be shown at Other Places art fair, Battery Leary-Merriam, San Pedro, CA.
Artists are responding to the concept of “surveillance” as interpreted through sculpture and video, using readily-available materials like discarded cinder blocks, lumber, and furniture, as well as tech-driven ones like webcams, processors, and CCTV that are now part of our daily lives.
Projects from Watch List include an ominous monolithic structure that emulates an NSA data server; surveillance cameras that are omnipresent but offer no clues as who is watching; live video streams that distort the viewer’s perception of reality in the digital sphere; and a sculptural sheath that only allows fragments of a concealed scene to pierce through its facade.
Works from Watch List express a heightened sense of anxiety with regard to perpetual military, government, and corporate surveillance. The use of such aggressive tactics illustrates our twisted technological reality, made unbearable in light of undocumented immigrant crackdowns, harassment of persons of color, and other scare tactics initiated by the Trump administration.