ART CITIES: N.York-Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose practice persistently interrogates the unseen forces that shape contemporary life. Known for bridging disciplines—ranging from photography, sculpture, investigative journalism, and writing to engineering and critical theory—Paglen’s work probes the invisible through the visible, unearthing the infrastructures of surveillance, militarism, and power that lie beneath the surface of everyday perception.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Central to Trevor Pagle’s  inquiry is a dual pursuit: learning to truly see the historical moment we inhabit and imagining the contours of alternative futures. Paglen’s solo exhibition “Cardinals” brings this investigation into sharp focus. The exhibition features a suite of extraordinary photographs—prints and Polaroids—documenting unexplained aerial phenomena in the American West, captured over the past two decades. Set against vast, often haunting landscapes near U.S. military testing grounds in California and Utah (including sites proximate to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty), these entirely unaltered images present minuscule UFOs suspended in expansive skies. Rather than offering definitive answers, the exhibition invites questions. The photographs, some of whose subjects remain unidentified even to the artist, dwell in ambiguity. Paglen exploits the memetic potency of the UFO—its ability to inspire speculation, projection, and belief—while withholding concrete explanations. This deliberate opacity mirrors our contemporary media landscape, in which the collapse of consensus truth has rendered perception itself unstable. As Paglen has observed, we are living through a historical rupture in how we relate to text, image, information, and reality. In this context, UFOs—long used by U.S. military and intelligence operations as psychological and strategic instruments—become a powerful metaphor. They blur the lines between observation and invention, sense and belief, logic and mythology. The photographs were produced using a range of analog and digital cameras, including a Phillips Compact II 8×10, a Wista 4×5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format systems—one adapted for infrared capture. Most images were shot on Kodak Portra, T-Max, or Fuji FP Instant film, reinforcing their tactile, historical quality. Paglen’s UFO imagery resonates with another significant thread in his practice: his photographic series documenting “unids” (unidentified objects in Earth’s orbit), tracked by the U.S. military. Captured using infrared telescopes from remote vantage points, these skyscapes transform technical data into poetic abstraction. Exhibited in his 2023 solo show at Pace, they render the cosmos as a textured, almost painterly space—one shaped by both surveillance and awe. “UFOs live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual,” Paglen reflects. “They inhabit the crossroads of fear, desire, logic, and hope.” It is this liminal quality—this refusal to resolve into certainty—that gives Cardinals its haunting relevance. The works do not document truth as much as they reveal how fragile and fluid our definitions of truth have become. In doing so, they ask us to confront the architectures of belief that govern both our skyward gaze and our social imagination.

Photo: Trevor Paglen, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 26/6-15/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/