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 10 th 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,”... Read more

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 10
th
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 19
th
Century photographers Timothy
O’Sullivan and Eadweard Muybridge to explore how relations between vision, geography, and time are being
radically reconfigured by 21
st
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.