SPOTTED (2009)

SPOTTED is a photographic wall-painting work which Garry Neill Kennedy developed between 2009-2012 during the height of the Global War on Terror. In this work Kennedy gathered photographs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) "extraordinary rendition" planes from public archives of images taken by plane spotters from around the world. By using the planes' ID numbers, which were made available by human rights groups, Kennedy was able to identify and collect images of the specific planes that were a part of the CIA's rendition program to create his large scale installation. 

In 2012, Kennedy expanded on his research and process:

"Extraordinary rendition is the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) program of transporting, by non-military airplane, suspected terrorists to locations where they are interrogated through the use of harsh techniques (torture). 

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International are able to identify the CIA planes by tracking their world-wide landing patterns and comparing the registration numbers applied to their fuselages to airport records. The planes are either leased or owned outright by CIA shell companies. 

The images of the rendition airplanes are readily available on websites that display the thousands of photographs taken by plane spotters. These are amateur photographers who enjoy the hobby of hanging out near airports taking pictures of airplanes approaching or leaving. Like bird-watchers and train-spotters their interest is in identifying, cataloguing and photographing their subject. Normally, plane spotters are not interested in taking photos of rendition airplanes per se but have co-incidentally photographed them, time and again...Sometimes the same plane is photographed several times by different spotters in different locations."

-Garry Neill Kennedy, SPOTTED statement for the travelling group exhibition Oh Canada, 2012.

SPOTTED has been exhibited at Red Gate Gallery / Residency (Beijing, China, 2009); as part of the group show Oh, Canada (MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA, 2012, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, PEI, 2014, and Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, 2015); in Garry Neill Kennedy: Photoworks, 1969-2011 (Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen Art Gallery at Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB, 2012, and PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg, MN, 2013); and as part of In the Open (Western Gallery, Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA, 2017). 

SPOTTED is now part of Nickle Galleries permanent collection, and the accompanying publication, by the same name, is available at Printed Matter Inc.