COMPLEX surveys the system of privately operated prisons which incarcerate migrants and maps the proliferation of industrialized border control apparatus. The project asserts that corporate detention centers are emblematic of an expanding 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.” 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 drive to secure the United States-Mexico border can be read as a culminating act of nation building. Border wall, surveillance infrastructure, and immigration prisons are the recent, built legacy of that enterprise. Ultimately, the project suggests the pervasiveness of the border security industrial complex in the American geography.

David Taylor’s 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 geopolitical, environmental, and social conditions. For two decades he has pursued projects that chronicle the changing circumstances of the United States-Mexico borderlands. Taylor’s 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, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Recent projects have appeared in Places Journal, Arizona Public Media, Guardian, Financial Times, Southwest Contemporary, and Border Chronicle. He was awarded a 2019 residency at Proyecto Siqueiros: La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico; a 2019 Arizona Commission for the Arts Research and Development Grant; and the 2023 Tucson Museum of Art Contemporary Art Society Prize.