ALBANY, NY.- The University Art Museum presents Job Security: Voices and Views from the American Security Industry in its main galleries, and Sky Hopinka’s film Dislocation Blues in the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery.

Job Security: Voices and View from the American Security Industry

The exhibition Job Security: Voices and Views from the American Security Industry explores the contours of the ever-expanding American security industry—its people, places, and ideologies. The exhibition makes visible an eight-year collaborative research project by artist Danny Goodwin and writer Edward Schwarzschild and features Goodwin’s black-and-white portraits, large-scale color photographs, and new video installations, alongside framed facsimiles of Schwarzschild’s redacted notebooks and interview transcripts with security personnel. The personal impetus for their research was their experiences of growing up with fathers who worked in security.

Drawing on elements from their forthcoming book, Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry (MIT Press, 2024), the UAM exhibition takes the breadth of their research beyond the printed page in order to call into question what we mean when we speak of security—Security for whom and by whom? In an era defined by national and global conflicts, widening ideological divides, and increasing political polarization, Job Security seeks to ask these questions through an individualized, nuanced approach.

Job Security features more than 50 works installed across both floors of the museum. The first floor otfers competing perspectives on the security industry by focusing on people interviewed in Goodwin and Schwarzschild’s book: workers and officials in government organizations and the private sector, targets of security operations, and critics of the industry. Their voices are presented through portraits, video installations, and redacted interview excerpts. Diagrams of Schwarzschild’s interview process make visible the project’s research methods and show the labor required to uncover the many voices heard in the exhibition. The second floor engages with questions of concealment, deception, and constructed realities through Goodwin’s large- scale color photographs of emergency simulation and security training facilities and photographs of his tabletop paper models of sites where access was digitally censored on Google Earth or physically restricted.

Sky Hopinka: Dislocation Blues

Sky Hopinka explores identity, language, politics, and history throughout his filmmaking, photography, and poetry. His short film Dislocation Blues (2017) looks at one of the largest Indigenous gatherings in the long history of Indigenous resistance: the 2016-17 Standing Rock protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that threatened to poison water resources, destroy ancestral burial grounds, and violate Indigenous national sovereignty. Themes of personal and political dislocation and the plaintive mood suggested by “blues” in the title circulate throughout the film.

Dislocation Blues otfers glimpses of law enforcement and the news media at Standing Rock, but its emphasis is on scenes that embody ambivalent feelings of belonging and fear within the camp’s diverse community. The film highlights the voices of two protestors, or Water Protectors. Cleo Keahna reflects on his experience at Standing Rock as he appears via Skype on a laptop screen, dislocated in space and time. He had arrived at a moment when he had been navigating his gender identity and was welcomed within the Two-Spirit Camp, one of many camps that gathered in solidarity at Standing Rock. (The term “Two-Spirit,” popularized in the 1990s, refers to Native non-binary gender traditions and activism.) The second voice we hear is Terry Running Wild, who Hopinka interviewed onsite during the protests. We never see Running Wild on camera; he is a voice dislocated from a body. Hopinka’s shots at waist or chest height that immerse us among the protestors, or camera tilts that capture a surveillance drone in the sky, amplify the urgency we hear in Running Wild’s words.

The 17-minute, single-channel color video runs continuously during museum hours and is presented as a wall- sized installation.