Brian Bartz & Kelley O'Leary: To Hear a Shadow

PRE-ORDER / SHIPS END OF JULY

July 2025, English, 5 x 7.5 in., 204 pages, b&w, soft cover, spiral-bound
Edition of 250
Design: Brian Bartz & Kelley O'Leary

To Hear a Shadow is the culmination of a research project into weather satellites. Over the course of two years, artists Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary used open-source radio technology and a hand-built antenna to intercept transmissions from aging NOAA satellites (officially decommissioned in June 2025). The images they found traveling invisibly through the air became the scaffolding for this book. Meanwhile, they fell down a rabbit hole, sifting through declassified Cold War era documents surrounding earth-imaging and the utility of vertical perspectives to the state. This ultimately led the artists to speculative questions surrounding the relationship between network infrastructure, militarization, and cosmic forces beyond human agency.

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Kelley O’Leary is an interdisciplinary artist based in Richmond, CA. Working across imagemaking, sculpture, video, and installation, she explores the relationships between media infrastructure, images and cosmic material bodies. Interested in speculative methods, she engages with both made and found artifacts that reflect how networked technologies mediate perception and restructure temporalities. She received her MFA from University of California, Davis in 2022 where she was the recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn award and the LeShelle and Gary May Purchase Prize. Her work has been shown nationally, including at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Timeshare, Pallas Gallery, Well Well Projects and Das Schaufenster.

Brian Bartz is an interdisciplinary sculptor and educator living and working in Berkeley, CA. Through his work, he seeks to defamiliarize our relationship with technology, often by making electronic objects with functions that are speculative, useless, poetic, or simply for their own sake. More recently, he has been particularly captivated by the aesthetics of communication technologies such as radio and satellites, and the ways they interact across landscape and place. Some of the research interests which animate his work include depictions of terraforming in science fiction, the present day effects of cold war militarization, and, more recently, the relationship between technology, mysticism, and the cosmos. He completed an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2020, and received a BA in fine art from Reed College in 2017. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Well Well Projects, Pallas Gallery, Soldes Gallery, and more. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco.