Denis Gillingwater

The CCTV surveillance system monitors collages mounted on my studio wall situated in Phoenix, Arizona. The collages are composed from my photographs taken in Chicago while “photographically surveilling” in April of this year. The area of concentration was the elongated Magnificent Mile and adjacent streets. On the north end is the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Contemporary Photography designates the south end. In between are the Chicago Art Institute and the Museum of Broadcast Communication. Also, the Mag Mile’s display windows were photographically consequential too.

The ideation within my overall work ranges between traditional definitions of industrial and societal surveillance to more free form photographic surveillance based approaches. The three collage’s intermix of images are a means for portraying the immensity of curatorial, cultural, racial, and historical issues and practices currently being revised within numerous institutional realms in our country and
around the world.

www.denisgillingwater.com