When people voice their opinions about war on the American airwaves, they tend to do so passionately. And they usually waste no time taking sides.

It goes a little like this: On one side, you have the hawks, whose solution to any conflict is to obliterate the enemy at all costs. On other, the anti-war activists, to whom the very idea of armed conflict is anathema. Each side has its cable channels and radio outlets, and seldom does anyone step across the great ideological divide that separates these fiercely held views.

Somewhere in the vast space between those arguments sits a series of photographs by Berkeley, Calif.-based artist Trevor Paglen, whose work appears in "Art of War," an ambitious series of exhibitions that opened last week in CEPA Gallery.

Each of Paglen's 40-by-60-inch photographs of the night sky is a quiet, ethereal skyscape, capturing an evocatively colored slice of the firmament that could have been produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The photographs each contain a small streak of light, which to the first-time viewer might seem to be a shooting star or simply a photographic aberration. But, according to Paglen — a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley and an internationally exhibited artist — the streaks are covert spy satellites, which he has meticulously tracked with the help of a team of scientists and photographed from remote locations across the United States.

Paglen's series, called "The Other Night Sky," is meant to draw viewers' attention to the global network of surveillance that constantly orbits the globe and serves as an integral tool of modern warfare. Unlike a great deal of art made about war, it does not explicitly endorse an ideological viewpoint or political position, preferring instead to illuminate a small part of what makes global conflict tick.\

"We tend to think things that are beautiful are good," Paglen said, when asked to explain why he chose to package such an unsettling message in such a classically beautiful form. "So to me, it's more interesting to make a beautiful image of something that is not necessarily good than it is to make an ugly image of something that you think is ugly."

And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the philosophy of "Art of War," a series of exhibitions by artists exploring specific conflicts around the world and the wider notion of war in general. Though clearly couched in an unabashedly leftist perspective — there are, for instance, no artists in the show who explicitly endorse war — the exhibition eschews the vitriolic political and polemical arguments that normally surround the topic. Instead, said CEPA curator and interim director Sean Donaher, it encourages viewers to think more deeply about the views they hold.

"I hope 'Art of War' gives people permission to actually talk about it and not be afraid of politics," Donaher said. "Think about it. If you could get a room full of people together and use artwork as a launching point for discussion that doesn't start on the poles?"

Donaher said he chose projects for the show not based on whether he agreed with the artist's political viewpoints, but simply on the quality of the artwork. The exhibition's goal, Donaher stressed, is conversation rather than conversion.

Another artist in the show, Daniel Joseph Martinez, produced an installation of large panels coated in several layers of gold-flake auto paint, each containing the name of an organization that has used violence to accomplish political goals, regardless of what those goals are. In the resulting work (shown at the high-profile 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City), an organization like the CIA can appear next to, for instance, Al-Qaeda, an approach sure to raise eyebrows and cause viewers to ask questions. That, Donaher said, is as it should be.

The show features an ongoing project by Walid Ra'ad that deals with the Lebanese wars of the last quarter-century, Australian artist Tom Nicholson's photographic reflection on a rebellion in East Timor that was quashed by the Indonesian government and Martha Rosler's collages of domestic scenes that explore Americans' perception of global conflict from the comfort of their own living rooms.

The exhibition will also feature several musical and theater performances, including a play performance piece and composition to be performed during the exhibition's summerlong run. These ancillary events, Donaher said, are an attempt to broaden the exhibition's reach to audiences that might not otherwise consider a show of such seemingly daunting conceptual art.

In the end, the show's aim is modest. For Donaher, and for the participating artists, it boils down to looking at the d

ebate about war, taking a step back and pausing to regard that big space in the middle of two political extremes.

"It's easy to veer to the extreme in one way or the other," Donaher said. "But there's a whole hell of a lot in between.

Artists capture visions of war in gold panels, burned books, the night sky

Daniel Joseph Martinez: "Divine Violence"

This piece, a series of gold-painted panels each inscribed with the name of an organization that uses violence to accomplish its goals, turned heads at the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City.

Walid Ra'ad: "Notebook Volume 38: Already been in a Lake of Fire" and an untitled series of photographs

Something of a fabulist on a historian's mission, the Lebanese-born Ra'ad has constructed a series of notebooks featuring images of cars of the same models that were used in Lebanese car bombings between 1975 and 1991. The notebooks contain notes scrawled by a fictional character of Ra'ad's own invention named Dr. Fadl Fakhouri about the car's model, the type of explosives used, the number of those killed in each bombing, and other information.

The show also features a series of weathered and scratchy photographs Ra'ad took in 1982, when he was 15, observing the Israeli attack on Beirut with his mother from a hill outside the city. Ra'ad received a degree in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a doctorate in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester.

Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh: "Index of the Disappeared: The Guantanamo Effect"

This installation, in the Buffalo and Erie County Central Library, is part of an ongoing research project to catalog "post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions and other disappearances." This section of the project combines books from the library's collection and other material amassed by Ghani and Ganesh (both based in New York City) that explore military prisons, extraordinary rendition programs, institutionalized torture and efforts by activist groups to uncover that information.

Martha Rosler: "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series"

In this collection of intentionally disturbing collages, Rosler updated an artistic tradition she began in the mid-1960s, with a series of collages reacting to the Vietnam War. In the pieces, Rosler uses news photos of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and inserts them into American domestic scenes. The result — as in one collage that shows two cut-outs of a well-dressed woman holding out a cell phone, while an explosion roils outside her window and two possibly deceased children sit in chairs in the background — is, to say the least, disconcerting.

Carlos Motta: "Brief History"

This piece consists simply of a large-scale wall mural, measuring some 20-by-8-feet, of soldiers marching and two timelines printed on sheets of newsprint. One is a history of United States military interventions in Latin America since 1946, the other a timeline documenting leftist guerrilla uprisings during roughly the same period. The takeaway is left up to the viewer.

Tom Nicholson: "After action for another library"

This series of photographs documents the systematic destruction of East Timor's libraries and private collections of books by the Indonesian government. It explores issues like the importance of knowledge and the fate of intellectuals in the course of armed conflicts.

Trevor Paglen: "The Other Night Sky"

Covert surveillance and spy satellites are the focus of this exhibition by University of California, Berkeley, geologist and artist Trevor Paglen, though you wouldn't know it simply by looking at his photographs.

"There's a couple of things going on in the photos," Paglen said. "One is the very basic idea of taking something familiar and making it unfamiliar taking an image of the sky, transforming it and saying this is also an image of war or surveillance or secrecy."

Other events:

"Unburdened" by Modest Productions, "Contents Under Pressure" by Amy Taravella and David Butler and "Dodging Bullets" by Keir Neuringer.

Toronto-based theater company Modest Productions will present Rehan Ansari's play "Unburdened," Aug. 18, 19 and 20 in the ALT Theatre (255 Great Arrow Ave.). Local artists Taravella and Butler will perform their original war-themed piece "Contents Under Pressure" at the ALT Theatre Aug. 5 to 14. And "Dodging Bullets," a piece of experimental music based on a video score projected onto the wall, will be peformed in CEPA Gallery (617 Main St.) at 8 p.m. July 11.

cdabkowski@buffnews.com