Surveillance Series

My constant use of a cell phone and laptop shows this seductive digital
technology plays a pervasive role in my life. Embracing the newest iPhone or the latest app, I capture, link and distribute what interests me.
Also a constant in my life is the network of surveillance in our country that means virtually everything I do digitally is no longer private. Digital cameras provide an endless loop of doubtful examination and ultimately reveal themselves as threats to freedom, civil liberty and identity privacy. On average, one surveillance camera operates per every eleven citizens, as we are recorded an average of 75 times per day. Among the targets of constant surveillance are email, phone calls, texting, online activities like personal finances, photographs, social media and business communications, and location services that track movement.

My art looks back at these cameras-- at the vast insertion of surveillance
cameras into the natural world, and shows the tangled, complex and hidden
aspects of this intrusion. One artwork, my installation USofA Drone Carpet, is a patterned arrangement of unusual objects placed upon a black, floating platform.  Alternating rows of 100 tiny drone sculptures are arranged in the pattern of the American flag, but in colors of gray and white, as somber representations of the United States as an instrument of surveillance. Using a wide range of different media such as graphite drawings, oil paintings, frescos, mixed media, 3-D printing, video and installation, I focus on this secretive relationship between subject and spectator in twenty new works of art, ranging from drawings over 14 feet long, of lurking cameras, to frescoes of miniature eyes watching back.

Margaret Keller
2017