2.20.2013

ARTIST TREVOR PAGLEN | METRO PICTURES | NYC 2013

MY PERSONAL FAVORITE: A PHOTO TO EXPLAIN "HOW WE EAT" TO ALIENS, HAHA!



"In his first exhibition at Metro Pictures, Trevor Paglen presents works related to his project The Last Pictures, a selection of photographs reflecting unease and uncertainty about the present, and a deep anxiety about the future... 
The exhibition includes a selection of key images from The Last Pictures. Among the large color prints and black-and-white diptychs is Angelus Novus (2012), a photograph of the backside of Paul Klee’s 1920 painting of the same name. Once owned by Walter Benjamin, the painting is an important reference in the philosopher’s last work “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). In the essay Benjamin argues for a circular conception of history, one recognizing that despite the notion of progress, societies produce and reproduce similar economic, humanitarian, and political crises. For Benjamin, the “angel of history” faces the past and is propelled backwards into the future by the ongoing explosions of the present. By presenting the back of the painting, Paglen asks his audience to look back at the ongoing crisis of the present. Additionally, there is a grid of 182 images collected for the project but ultimately excluded and a video of the satellite in orbit.
Also exhibited are photographs, "skyscapes," of nearly undetectable surveillance drones in a seemingly empty field, a massive National Security Agency data center under construction in suburban Utah, and secret satellites in the night’s sky. Paglen’s images are both documents of clandestine military operations and a contribution to the history of photographic abstraction, following in the tradition of Alfred Stieglitz’s landmark “Equivalents” series of imposing clouds in an inordinately black sky."
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TREVOR PAGLEN SPEAKING WITH MoMA JAs.

ENERGIZED TREVOR PAGLEN...




... SERIOUS TREVOR PAGLEN.

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