|
Altman Siegel Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by
Trevor Paglen. This will be Paglen's second exhibition with the gallery
and will feature an entirely new body of work. The exhibition opens on
February 10th and run through April 2nd, 2011.
For Unhuman, Paglen extends his earlier work on
secrecy, distance, and epistemology to include questions about vision,
geography, time, and a troubled history of photography. "I think of photography
as the history and practice of 'seeing' with machines," Paglen explains. "With
some of these newer works, I'm trying to understand what the implications of
machine-seeing are for both how we perceive the world and actively intervene in
it."
As in his previous bodies of work, Paglen focuses on the
darker workings of the military and intelligence world. A series of large-scale
skyscapes recalling the abstractions
of
Rothko, Turner, and Stieglitz are punctuated by the presence of military and CIA
drones used for covert operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and other locales. A short
landscape video, entitled Drone Vision,
is crafted from the raw video feed of a drone over Eastern Europe. It's source
material was surreptitiously downloaded from an unsecure communications
satellite by one of Paglen's collaborators. "When we're talking about the
history and practices of seeing with machines, we're really talking about
weapons systems. By and large, those two histories are one and the same," says
Paglen.
In other new works, Paglen extends his exploration of
machine-seeing into an investigation of geography and time. Works such as Artifacts and Time Study, reinterpret tropes from 19th Century photographers
Timothy O'Sullivan and Eadweard
Muybridge
to explore how relations between vision, geography, and time are being radically
reconfigured by 21st century technologies and practices. As theorist Brian
Holmes says in a recent essay about Paglen's work: "What these works ask the
viewer to perceive is something different: not just individuals, installations
or technical devices, but the larger order... the world into which they
fit."
Trevor Paglen is currently the subject of a solo survey show at the
Vienna Secession. He has had recent solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum;
Kunsthall Oslo; Kunsthalle Giessen; and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. His
recent group exhibitions include Free,
The New Museum, New York; Exposed,
SFMOMA, San Francisco and the Tate Modern, London; FotoFest, Houston; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; and Experimental
Geography, ICI, New York. Trevor Paglen is a 2008 recipient of SFMOMA's
SECA Art Award. Paglen's first photographic monograph, Invisible was recently published by Aperture, and is available
at the gallery.
For
more
information, please contact the gallery at 415-576-9300 or info@altmansiegel.com.
|
