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15/11/2006

Trevor Paglen

Bellwether, New York

Black World

Bellwether is pleased to announce Trevor Paglen's first solo show at the gallery. Entitled "Black World," the exhibition features a startling collection of photographs, videos, and images exploring the deepest recesses of the military industrial complex.

Over the last five years, Trevor Paglen has developing unique visual strategies to explore the "black world" of classified military and intelligence activities. To produce his photographs of secret military installations Paglen uses powerful telescopes and employs astronomical techniques to capture his subject from dozens of miles away - a proprietary technique he terms "Limit-Telephotography." The sheer distances, heat, and atmospheric distortions captured in his work result in photographs that often take on the qualities of impressionistic paintings.

Paglen is the first and only person to have photographed several of the CIA's "black sites" overseas - a collection of secret prisons whose existence (but not locations) the CIA has only recently acknowledged. These never-before-seen photographs will also be on display. Other works on view include a diverse collection of patches and symbols worn by people working on secret military programs - programs that do not officially "exist" - and forged signatures from the corporate documents of CIA front companies.

By confronting us with images of a world that cannot be seen with the naked eye, and that do not "officially" exist, Paglen asks the viewer to meditate on the limits of vision, abstraction and the nature of evidence as he performs a series of stunning interventions into the history of landscape photography.

Trevor Paglen is a PHD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His recent book, "Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights" was released this fall. His work was recently exhibited in the show, "Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History" at Mass MoCA.

Opening: Thursday, November 16, 2006, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Bellwether
134 Tenth Avenue - New York

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