…and the sea will cough up its fishes and loaves…
(words by Charles Bowden in Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez, 2010, p. 152)
COMPLEX includes several bodies of David Taylor’s recent photographs, videos, and sculptures that document the shape, place, and industrial scale of border management in the Southwestern United States. Thirty-two oblique aerial views of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers sited in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi serve as the namesake for the exhibition. These drone-negotiated photographs completed between 2019 and 2023 are installed four high and eight wide, a fierce inventory measuring about 8 x 22 feet on one wall. The exhibition also includes several other aggregate works including Panorama/Panopticon – Ambos Nogales, Panorama/Panopticon, 64.7 Miles, and Prototype Structures for the Triumphal Architecture of Manifest Destiny, all completed between 2022-24.
David Taylor, installation view of the portfolio “COMPLEX,” 2019-23, pigment prints mounted on Dibond, each image: 20×30 inches
The portfolio, COMPLEX, samples 32 of 56 ICE detention centers in the Southwest corridor, almost all sited in rural areas or on the edges of small towns (one exception being the Central Texas Detention Center, San Antonio, TX, downtown in the 200 block of South Laredo Street). The incarceration facilities traverse deserts, riparian plains, farmlands, and commercial rice fields from California to Mississippi. 19 of Taylor’s sample of 32 prisons are located in Texas. And, according to ICE’s website, Texas has the largest number (26) of active immigrant detention facilities authorized to hold individuals longer than 72 hours. Louisiana is a distant second with ten facilities; New Mexico has four, Arizona has five, and California has eight. Excluding U.S. territories, ICE lists 161 detention centers spread among 43 states. Seven states have none. ICE also notes that their list “does not include juvenile or family residential facilities.” In 2018, the Government Accounting Office noted that ICE had 3 family detention centers, two in Texas.
David Taylor, “West Texas Detention Facility, Sierra Blanca, TX,” 2022, pigment print, 20×30 inches
David Taylor, “Rio Grande Detention Facility, Laredo, TX,” 2022, pigment print, 20×30 inches
Taylor’s chilling clarity of these ICE prisons might find a welcome reception in the annual reports of CoreCivic, one of several contracted private companies to run the U.S. government’s immigrant detention business. Sunlit precision dominates the images; no fog of war here. The aerial images stare obliquely, efficiently enveloping the material and spatial dimensions of ICE’s engineering for controlling contemporary human migrations. The facilities incorporate modular pods, the building blocks for immigrant incarceration. Not unlike other warehousing facilities scattered near American transportation networks (for comparison google Amazon or Walmart warehouses as examples), Taylor’s images of ICE’s prisons reify the material consequences of capital investment in the incarceration industry: land acquisition, roadways, fencing, facility design and construction, utilities, vehicles, maintenance, and so much more. The images suggest substantial and regular investments in staff and administration, food distribution, and equipment. Taylor’s expansive wall of 32 detention centers is a summation of the demands of capital to ever-expand revenue and generate profit. In this case, the profit flows from the uncertain fates and pathways of human migrants, the primary commodity of this business. Taylor’s photographs confirm the success and growth of this containment industry, and they monumentalize its consequences.
David Taylor, “South Texas Family Residential Center, Dilley, TX,” 2020, pigment print, 20×30 inches
David Taylor, “Central Texas Detention Center, San Antonio, TX,” 2020, pigment print, 20×30 inches
Taylor has had his cameras focused on the Mexico-U.S. border for several decades. His earliest “border experiences” in the 1990s were unruffled — languid rural stretches of barbed wire stretched between teetering mesquite posts, turnstiles, and easily compromised chain link fences near urban centers. In 1999, he moved from Oregon to Las Cruces, NM, less than fifty miles from the Paso del Norte bridge connecting El Paso and Juárez. In 2001, 9/11 and the rapid evolution of policing the border emphatically hardened human passage from south to north. Taylor focused on this accelerated evolution and his photographs and videos in Frontier/Frontera, A Line in the Sand, Monuments, Working the Line, and DeLIMITations (with Marcos Ramirez ERRE) characterize his commitment (embedding himself for several years with the Border Patrol) to explore the border’s past and present complexities.
Prototype Structures for the Triumphal Architecture of Manifest Destiny, also in the Pidgin Palace exhibition, includes a triptych video installation. The drone-captured videos, massaged with AI software, horizontally arranged edge to edge, record the detainment of migrants by agents of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). About six or so feet in front of the video screens one looks down on a meticulously accurate, scaled version of a portion of the Trump-inspired border wall with an attached surveillance tower combined with modular cells for incarcerated immigrants, all painted matte grey and resting on a pedestal that raises the model about 18 inches above the gallery floor. This miniature wall and its attachments share the corporate odor of the detention center photographs. The title of this installation suggests, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Taylor’s disposition toward the “divine interventions” manifested by the Department of Homeland Security on people migrating into the U.S. Who triumphed?
David Taylor, “Prototype Structures for the Triumphal Architecture of Manifest Destiny,” 2022-24, wood sculpture and 4K videos
Prototype Structures, as well as COMPLEX, focus on the architecture that services the U.S. government’s determination to secure access to “god-given” boundaries and control select human populations. Distant and recent history runs amok with analogs: billets for Africans forced into slavery; internment camps for Japanese descendants; boarding schools for Indigenous children; concentration camps for Jews, Romani, and other candidates selected for genocide.
Panorama/Panopticon—Ambos Nogales expands on past architectural strategies for human incarceration. The installation includes a stereo viewer, a panorama photograph of Nogales, and ten additional stereo photographs, primarily of surveillance towers sporting appendages of information-gathering tools positioned along the U.S. border of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. The towers, stationary robots installed for 24-7 control of suspect populations, are the hub of panoramic surveillance, a product evolved from the 18th-century panopticon, a circular prison with cells lining the edges in constant view of the center. The Nogales towers collect data in 360 degrees. The endless stream of information turns into intelligence to secure the border, deter interlopers, and hasten retention.
Panorama/Panopticon, 64.7 Miles (2022-2024) is a binocular video installation of a surveillance tower (left screen) and its subject topography (right screen). Real-time, methodical video scans at the tower’s height. Viewers share the predatory vantage point, not unlike raptors cruising for quarry. A sense of reluctant (at least for me) participation charges anxiety; the discomfort edges into an examination of one’s agency, if any. These videos, like the other works noted above, have a cleanliness and lucidity that counterbalances any messy introspection. The sun shines, the winds calm, the atmosphere sparkles as we are watched and watching. Throughout the exhibition, Taylor’s juxtaposition of clean, orderly, objectified images investigating the industry of migration shadow the heated political, physical, and economic dimensions of “on-the-ground” immigration.
David Taylor, stills from “Panorama/Panopticon, 64.7 Miles,” 2022-24, two-channel 4K video
COMPLEX is not an exhibition that excavates normative characterizations of human suffering. The absence of pain is conspicuous…no images of brutality, of wrenching emotional choices, of fevered consequences inflicted by personal violence. No starving, dehydrated children. No human scars or bleeding wounds. If inclined, we, the audience, make these connections. And so, Taylor’s images provide documentary glimpses of the machinery and technology of contemporary migration industries but we are left to conjure and consider its intimate applications.
COMPLEX: New Work by David Taylor is at Pidgin Palace Arts, Tucson, AZ from October 29 through December 14, 2024.
Peter S. Briggs is an art historian and curator who lives in Tucson, AZ.
