“The stock in trade of supermarket tabloids and holy grail of conspiracy theorists, images of UFOs test the relationship between photography and belief.. Unlike the countless photographs that seek to prove the existence of flying saucers, Wasow’s photographs instead use the idea of the extraterrestrial aircraft to subject his own medium to scrutiny. “While I don’t have that much interest in UFOs themselves,” Wasow has admitted, “I am interested in photographs of UFOs and the questions that come to mind when looking at them - "what is it? Is it real?" – Many of his haunting pictures appears to depict a penumbral UFO hovering above an apocalyptic terrain, but rather than providing solid evidence, the murky contours indecipherable topography invite speculation the murky contours and indecipherable typography invite speculation instill uneasiness.
Wasow courts doubt by distorting found images and running them through a battery of processes. The result is a blindingly unfamiliar landscape, suggesting but never revealing what the artist called “the existence and the mystery of other perhaps imaginary, times and places” The evidentiary capacity of photography, which has so long fought to distinguish it from other media, is purposefully diminished in Wasow’s work. Indeed, some subjects are more at home in the twilight of speculation than in the stark light of reason”
--Mia Fineman, Catalog Essay for “Faking It”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014
