BELLWETHER is pleased to announce Trevor Paglen’s second solo show. For the past several years, Paglen has been working with observational data from amateur astronomers to track and photograph nearly 200 classified American objects in Earth orbit. Depicting everything from football-field sized eavesdropping spacecraft 23,000 miles above earth to photoreconnaissance satellites with names like “IKON” and “ADVANCED CRYSTAL,” Paglen’s “Other Night Sky” series reveals a very different sky than the one most of us see when we look up at the stars on a clear evening.

Trained as both an artist and geographer, Paglen is a conceptual artist, landscape photographer, and an explorer. For nearly a decade, Paglen has researched, written about, and visualized the secret corners of the American state. Whether researching front companies spearheading the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, photographing classified air bases in the Great Basin, knocking on the doors of unacknowledged “black site” prisons, or tracking top-secret spacecraft in Earth orbit, Paglen’s work is consistently characterized by serious investigation, innovative methodology, and formal and conceptual rigor. Paglen’s visual work captures various combinations of beauty and terror constituting a 21st century vision of the political and technological sublime.

Trevor Paglen is a 2008 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award, which features an exhibition that runs concurrently with this exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 his work will be featured in a solo exhibition at Secession, Vienna. His recent group exhibitions include Experimental Geography, Independent Curators International, New York; Conspire, Transmediale.08, Berlin; Crimes of Omission, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Paglen recently published his third book Blank Spots on the Map, which is widely available in bookstores.