By Seth Lower

“The Other Night Sky, MATRIX 225″

The tables have turned on stargazers; now we are the ones being watched. Just a friendly reminder from Mr. Trevor Paglen that ET is not the only eye in the sky.

I learned about Trevor’s work a couple of years ago at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I was struck then by his grainy efforts at describing top-secret places, and I’m struck now—it’s the best photo show I’ve seen in months. At first, the exhibit, tucked into a corner near the ticket desk, seems small. But as I walk further, it opens up—there are 12 photographs of various sizes, all beautiful starscapes except a single close-up image of the moon. The titles are cryptic and evocative: LACROSSE/ONYX II Passing Through Draco (USA 69). They are images of huge swaths of stars surrounding tiny government satellites, located through various means of research and analysis. Suddenly, the images’ dreamlike beauty becomes menacing as I start to differentiate stars from spies. They trail through the scene, leaving lines across the heavens as proof of their existence. They even seem to twinkle in defiance as my shadow passes over them.

I continue on and then, as I enter into a darkened back room, a huge glowing orb materializes from the ether. It’s a silk-screened globe hanging in the middle of the room, rotating as four video projectors spot it with tiny points of light—satellites, like fireflies cruising high above the Earth. Paglen has programmed the installation to project accurate representations of global satellite behaviors. The motor mounted to the ceiling hums softly but, aside from that, it’s silent. I watch it for a few rotations to see if the light movements and trajectories repeat themselves, but I’m so transfixed by the thing that I can’t remember what I’m looking for.

Between the formal beauty of the works and the political punch of their content, Trevor manages to bridge a gap that sometimes opens between formalists and social-minded conceptualists. Trained as an artist as well as a geographer (Ph.D. from UC Berkeley), he’s found a perfect niche for himself. In the work I saw at Yerba Buena, Paglen employed similar long-range photography (up to 40 miles) techniques to produce blurred images of secret high security locations throughout the world, including sites of questionable CIA questioning tactics. Many images were also taken in the southwest—a new, old frontier not unlike space in its history of expansion.

There’s also something appealing about information transfer within such an imperfect medium; even with total objective fulfillment, the facts remain uncertain. They’re photographs, after all, and we’re taking his word that they are satellites and not just dental floss strung over an airbrushed background. Regardless, the suggestion is enough—they’re haunting and smart, and absolutely worth seeing.

If you go after August 6th, you’ll get in free but you’ll miss the other treats on view now, like Joan Jonas’s hyper-western work, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things - a mysterious exploration of Hopi culture and the writings of Aby Warburg. Think Joseph Beuys on acid. Also on view (until August 3rd) is Jim Campbell’s Home Movies – an impressive LED adaptation of found family films and photos by Bruce Connor, the recently departed genius. So get out of the city, let the classics be classic—check out BAM’s new intelligence this summer.