RWFA is pleased to announce Alex Turner: Blind River, on view and online through October 30, 2021

Remote-sensing and recognition applications, whether deployed for research or surveillance purposes, monitor similar spaces, capture similar footage, and analyze data using similar algorithmic tools. Their deployers observe and compile narrow information sets consistent with their motives. In many cases, human vision and recognition becomes secondary: the watcher (camera system) informs the identifier (software) autonomously. Despite these tools of enhanced vision, our capacity to see and understand is clouded by layers of detachment. Does de-humanized observation generate an impassive and simplified lens through which to view this complex and contested space? Is there room for empathy in a system that promotes objectivity?
- Alex Turner

In the remote realms of the Sonoran desert, near the US border with Mexico in Arizona, exists a continuous yet capricious current between the two countries consisting of humans, vehicles, and wildlife. While largely unpopulated, the region is very much in the forefront of political and social discourse today, constantly under electronic observation and recorded through a variety of surveillance techniques. The purpose of such documentation varies from scientific research to government border security.

Photographer Alex Turner, in Blind River - his MFA thesis exhibition at the University of Arizona School of Art - analyzed the surveillance of the region by accessing systems of landscape photography installed by various wildlife researchers concerned with the encroaching limitations placed on migration patterns due to human intervention in the landscape, such as border wall construction. Turner joins his mentor, David Taylor, and cut paper artist Donna Ruff, at RWFA in continuing to push the intersection of photography and social concerns today.

Remote sensing and recognition applications reduce their subjects down to a percentage of probability: Human, 73% or Jaguar, 54%. The computer captures and analyzes for us, but what these screen grabs and statistics fail to comprehend is the sociopolitical and environmental concerns that led the subjects to this space in the first place. Flattened to a statistic and pattern desensitizes the viewer’s perception of the subject, however removing the surveillance footage out of its intended space forces the viewer to question the imagery further.