When
Where
The Center for Latin American Studies is partnering with the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry this fall to host the Charlas con Café Speaker Series – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, Fridays from 1-2 pm (unless otherwise specified).
Coffee & snacks at 12:30pm!
This talk will discuss his recent projects which form the latest chapters in a two-decade effort to chronicle the changing borderlands. His work casts the borderlands as an intensively surveilled terrain manufactured by private industry while positing that border infrastructure functions within the language of monuments and memorials. If we reveal our societal priorities and values through what we build, then structures associated with border security, surveillance and migrant detention are among our nation’s most ambitious, recent projects. Taylor asserts that detention centers and border control apparatus are emblematic of an expansion of the borderland security regime which, in its totality, functions as a system of overlapping views and regulated spaces. In Department of Homeland Security parlance, the promise is “situational awareness” and “operational control.” In reality, perceived gaps in the system necessitate ever increasing measures—a perpetual cycle of escalation. In effect, the border reproduces itself at a cost measured in both human life and billions of dollars. Symbolically, the work of securing the U.S./Mexico border can be read as a culminating act of nation building. Border wall, surveillance infrastructure and detention facilities are the recent, built legacy of that enterprise. Ultimately COMPLEX suggests the pervasiveness of the border security industrial complex in the American geography.
David Taylor is a professor at the College of Arts at the U of A, his artwork examines place, territory, history and politics. Exhibited internationally, his projects reveal how borders can function not only as spatial demarcations, but also as an amplifying device particularly attuned to geo-political, environmental and social conditions. Pursuing projects that chronicle the changing circumstances of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, he was awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and has released two monographs–Working the Line (Radius Books, 2010) and Monuments: 276 Views of the United States – Mexico Border (Radius Books and Nevada Museum of Art, 2015). His artwork is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Nevada Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the MFA Houston. Widely published, Taylor’s projects have been featured in outlets such as Art LTD., The Guardian, The New Yorker blog, Politico, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Places Journal, PREFIX PHOTO, Fraction Magazine, the Mexico/Latin America Edition of Esquire Magazine and Arquine. Exhibition venues include the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, the MCA San Diego, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC, Museo de las Artes Universidad de Guadalajara, Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, MFA Houston, Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Boise Art Museum.