I Spy: Surveillance and Security with Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Paul Shambroom :: until April 30, 2010 :: Sun Valley Center for the Arts, 191 5th Street East, Ketchum, Idaho.

I Spy: Surveillance and Security examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. At the same time that we are debating how to balance civil rights against our need for security, corporations use hidden cameras and track our internet use to sell us their products. Millions of us willingly (or unwittingly) give up our privacy to participate in social networking sites like Facebook.

How has increased governmental and corporate intrusion into our lives shaped our assumptions about what is private and what is public? How has our definition of civil liberties changed? What effect has the Internet and the boom in social networking sites had on our behavior? Are we safer now than we were before?

Between 2003 and 2005, Deborah Aschheim created six installations she called Neural Architecture (a smart building is a nervous building). “Nervous systems” for architecture, these sculptural projects reflect our tendency to think about buildings in human terms. They also convey our ambivalence toward surveillance; technologies that initially seem invasive or Orwellian eventually become simple conveniences. The sculpture Aschheim presents in this exhibition is a recreation of one neural column from her earlier projects.

Hasan Elahi has made his everyday life part of his artwork. Erroneously targeted as a suspected terrorist and interrogated by the FBI, Elahi decided that his best defense was to open up his life to public and governmental scrutiny. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is an online database that documents his travels, finances and even the meals he eats on airplanes. For I Spy, Elahi is creating a timely installation that considers security and surveillance in the world of aviation. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is a project of Creative Capital.

The work of artist, writer and geographer Trevor Paglen explores the relationship between surveillance and security in a post-September 11th world. His long-distance photographs of secret military installations, badges from classified military programs and photos of U.S. spy satellites in orbit expose a world of secret operations and surveillance that sometimes exists in plain sight.

From 2003 to 2007 Paul Shambroom photographed Homeland Security training environments like “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town” in New Mexico. His images of personnel in their disaster gear, training in simulated settings, get at the difficulty we sometimes have discerning between legitimate security threats and paranoid fear. Shambroom is a 2001 Creative Capital Visual Arts grantee.

Related Programs

Lecture: Living in a Wired World: Can Personal Privacy Survive in the 21st Century?
by Frederick Lane
Attorney, author and technology expert
March 10, 7pm

Lecture: The Role of Surveillance in National Security
by John Lehman
Former Secretary of the Navy and member of the 9/11 Commission
April 1, 7pm