Trevor Paglen
You've Just Been Fucked by PSYOPS
Pace Gallery, New York
May 12 – July 22, 2023
Because Physical Wounds Heal..., 2023
© Trevor Paglen, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of new work by Trevor Paglen titled You’ve Just Been Fucked by PSYOPS. This show marks the artist’s first solo presentation with Pace in New York. Featuring photography, sculpture, video, and other work, this thematic presentation examines the enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture. This exhibition serves as the conceptual nucleus of a multifaceted project by the artist that also includes a Web3 project, released by Art Blocks x Pace Verso on April, and related “speculative reality work” launching this spring.
Trevor Paglen, whose rigorous practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, Trevor Paglen has explored artificial intelligence, surveillance, data collection, and militarism in America, meditating on the ways these issues influence modes of perceiving and relating to the natural world, from the landscapes of the American West to the cosmological realms beyond the Earth.
His exhibition with Pace in New York brings together five new bodies of work. Issues of subjectivity and deception course through the show, which includes a selection of photographs of “unids,” or “unidentifieds”—the many hundreds of unknown objects in orbit around the Earth that are monitored and tracked by the US military—captured by the artist using infrared telescopes in remote locations. In his methodical and highly technical process for creating these images, Trevor Paglen uses specialized software and hardware to locate and photograph objects in the sky. Atmospheric and mysterious, the resulting skyscapes show the light trails of “unids,” drawing out the abstracted, textural qualities of the cosmos. The look of the artist’s photographs is inspired by the work of 19th century artist Gustave Doré, especially his etchings of Paradise Lost.
Trevor Paglen’s presentation also features two large-scale sculptures that reflect his longstanding engagement with deception operations. One of the artist’s new sculptures on view in the show is inspired by the “challenge coin” used by the US army’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO) command, previously known as PSYOP. This circular, wall-mounted work—composed of steel, bullets, resin, and other materials—depicts a haunting skull at its center surrounded by a Latin translation of a slogan widely used in PSYOP units: “You’ve just been fucked by PSYOPS. Because physical wounds heal.” A second message for viewers to decode on their own is inscribed along an outer ring of the sculpture. This work aligns with Trevor Paglen’s interest in the ways that psychological influence operations developed by the US military are utilized in advertising, political campaigns, social media, and artificial intelligence.
The second sculpture in the show is inspired by a class of objects developed by the CIA and US military to conduct unusual surveillance operations in foreign airspace. The shapes of these so-called “palladium” objects echo those of the many UAPs sighted and reported in the last few years. Bearing radar signatures completely different from their physical forms to spoof other countries’ surveillance systems, these objects have been used by the CIA and military to collect electronic signals from foreign radar and surface-to-air missile systems to learn about their frequencies and capabilities. Trevor Paglen’s mirror-reflective, freestanding sculpture takes its dynamic, abstract shape from an airborne radar reflector patent dating to 1945.
A new video installation in Trevor Paglen’s exhibition spotlights disinformation operative Richard Doty, who worked for Air Force Intelligence in the 1980s. In the film, Doty describes his work targeting UFO researchers as part of military disinformation operations as well as the “real” top-secret extraterrestrial technology program that he says continues to this day. During his time at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, Doty supplied fake documents to UFO investigators, purporting to tell the “truth” about government involvement with extraterrestrials. An unreliable narrator who oscillates between skepticism and certainty, Doty discusses the craft of disinformation and reports his encounters with crashed UFOs and alien beings in Trevor Paglen’s new film installation.
This exhibition anchors the artist’s new, multi-part, gamified project encompassing an NFT series and speculative reality work in the form of a mainframe computer interface and vinyl LP record, which can be experienced as part of the in-person presentation in New York. Like Trevor Paglen’s solo show, these interactive works center on themes of “mind control,” PSYOPS, and disinformation. To learn more about Paglen’s NFT series, you can visit:
TREVOR PAGLEN
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, MD) is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a widereaching approach that’s pans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. The clandestine and the hidden are revealed in series such as The Black Sites, The Other Night Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Trevor Paglen’s investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilize text, video, object, and image to explore questions surrounding military culture and language. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.
Trevor Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.
In tandem with his museum exhibitions, Trevor Paglen is well-known for his site-specific public projects, among them, The Last Pictures (2013), an artwork containing a micro-etched disc with one hundred photographs into geostationary orbit around Earth via the communications satellite EchoStar XVI, produced in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT. In 2015, Trevor Paglen created Trinity Cube, a radioactive public sculpture made from material collected within the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan, and from Trinitite, the radioactive material made from molten sand after the testing of the Atomic Bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. In addition, Trevor Paglen achieved critical acclaim for his contributed research and cinematography on the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras. Trevor Paglen is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vice Magazine,the New Yorker, and Artforum. In 2017, Trevor Paglen was the recipient ofthe MacArthur Genius award, and in 2014, he received theElectronic Frontier Foundation’sPioneer Award for his work as a “groundbreaking investigative artist.” Trevor Paglen holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.
PACE NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York, NY
