Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Trevor Paglen at its recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. On view from November 11 to December 24, the show, titled A Color Notation, will bring together new and recent landscape photography by the artist. The presentation will focus on Paglen's visual transformations of natural landscapes through computer programming and artificial intelligence algorithms. A Color Notation will mark the artist's first solo exhibition at Pace's gallery in the Korean capital.
Paglen's rigorous practice encompasses photography, sculpture, video, and installation, and his process often incorporates engineering and journalism. Paglen is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, the artist has explored 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. In recent years, Paglen has presented solo exhibitions at the San José Museum of Art in California; the CarnegieMuseum of Art in Pittsburgh; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea; the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City; and the Barbican Centre in London.
The medium- and large-format photographs in Paglen's forthcoming exhibition with Pace in Seoul were made using a custom-built computer vision system developed in the artist's studio. Through this process, the artist reveals the visual outputs of analyses from different computational systems, which draw on his original photographs to generate new interpretations of his images.
Some of the works in A Color Notation are forged with 'classical' computer vision algorithms utilised in applications for self-driving cars, industrial manufacturing, weapons systems, and robotics—these algorithms register in the images as fine lines, circles, and other basic shapes. Other artworks in the show have been analysed by artificial intelligence or machine-learning algorithms that detect and identify different components of black-and-white photographs. In the resulting images, randomised and arbitrary colours represent the regions differentiated from one another by the AI system.Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice.
A Color Notation will feature a selection of works created by Paglen in 2020 and 2022. Among them are images from the artist's Bloom series, for which he transforms black-and-white images of blossoming flowers into vibrant and intensely textural tableaus using the AI process. A selection of the artist's ethereal images of clouds, which show the delicate lines produced by the 'classical' computer vision algorithms amid skies of warm purples, pinks, oranges, and reds, will also be on view. Two images of Multnomah Falls in Oregon, one of which is the only black-and-white work in the exhibition, illustrate the wide ranging, otherworldly visual effects from the computer algorithms. The aesthetic beauty of these and other works in the exhibition belie their conceptual and technical complexities.
The group exhibition Codes and algorithms. Wisdom in a calculated world at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, which features Paglen's work and continues through April 17, 2023, coincides with the artist's upcoming exhibition withPace in Seoul. His work is also on view in Slip.Stream.Slip (Part 2) at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) in Manchester,United Kingdom, through December 16. Paglen will participate in the forthcoming group exhibition My Life in the Metaverse, opening at the Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi on November 14.
Presented in the main gallery space of Pace's Seoul gallery, A Color Notation will coincide with an ongoing solo exhibition by the interdisciplinary art collective teamLab, running through December 24 in the gallery's recently opened ground floor exhibition space specially equipped for experiential and immersive artworks. On the occasion of Frieze Seoul inSeptember, Pace unveiled its new outdoor sculpture courtyard and Osulloc Tea House at its arts complex in the city.
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is known for his wide-reaching and interdisciplinary practice that incorporates image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines into his unique approach to art. Paglen constantly questions the limits of visuality in series such as The Black Sites, The OtherNight Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Paglen's investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilise 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 livein and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.
Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2018), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018), Fondazione Prada (2019), 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). Hehas 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, Paglen is well-known for his site-specific public projects, among them, Sight Machine, an interactive performance with the Kronos Quartet, Orbital Reflector with the Nevada Museum of Art, and TheLast 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. In2015, 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 AtomicBomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.
In addition, Paglen achieved critical acclaim for his contributed research and cinematography on the Academy Award winning film Citizen four, directed by Laura Poitras. 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, The New Yorker, and Artforum.
Paglen is the recipient of the 2016 Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize, 2018 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, and was the 2017 recipient of the MacArthur 'Genius' award. 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.
Press release courtesy Pace Gallery.
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