"It wasn't meant to end like this," The Glue Society (2009)

[Beatriz] Punta Cana, Dominican Republic; from the series Generations. Photograph by Mariliana Arvelo.

[Viscosity (No. 1)] 2003-04. Photograph by Esther Teichmann.

From the series [In Water] by Ethan Aaro Jones.

[My Father] Naples, Florida, 2006.  Photograph by Doug Dubois.

[Untitled #9 (Surfers)] 2003.  Photograph by Catherine Opie.

He has the ability to imagine himself a minor incident in the lives of others. It is not an abstract thing. Alex-Li Tandem would not know quite what you meant by ‘abstract’ – he is twelve. He simply knows that if he imagines swimming in the sea, well, while most children will think immediately of the cinematic shark below them, Alex, in his mind, is with the lifeguard. He can see himself as that smudge on the horizon, his head mistaken for a bobbing buoy, his wild arms hidden by the roll of the surf. He can see the lifeguard, a bronzed and languid American, standing on the sand with his arms folded, deciding there’s nothing out there. Alex sees the lifeguard wander off down the beach in search of those half-bare German girls from yesterday and a cold drink. The lifeguard buys a Coke from a passing vendor. The shark severs Alex’s right calf from his body. The lifeguard sidles up to Tanya, the pretty one. The shark drags Alex in a bloody semicircle through the water. The lifeguard speaks kindly to her ugly friend with the flat chest, hoping for brownie points. Some vertebrae snap. Did you see that? A seal! says Tanya, mistaking Alex’s desperate hand for the turn of a glossy flipper. And then he’s gone. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a seal? No, it’s me, drowning. This is how things go for Alex-Li. He deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves.

Excerpt from The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

[Rising] 1998.  [enlarge] Photograph by David Hilliard.

Hesselberg and Bruah both playfully twist and turn the human form, puppeteering in a way, manipulating this thingness of tangled arms and legs.  Both photographers obscure or cut out any defining features of their subjects.  Faceless, these beings are at most male or female, but empty of any more specific identity.

Identity is dictated, hidden, and revealed by these beings’ surroundings, which are powerful.  A vague social anxiety permeates the air.

(Below, from top to bottom: Susanna Hesselberg, Jessica Bruah, Susanna Hesselberg)

Hesselberg’s figures are molded optical illusions — whether they’re staged sculptural/performance pieces, or pinpointed photographic decisive moments (as when a cloud of smoke or tossed paper wad take on the role of a man’s head).  There’s a Wonderland sense that anything can happen, though any delight or forboding message comes across as only a whisper alongside the spellbinding visuals, in which things and people merge.  (Below: Photographs by Susanna Hesselberg)

Brauh has more specifically identified a tone in facelessness — a kind of domestic anxiety in dollhouse dressings.  This is a home life wherein a viewer can’t tell the difference between people and manequins.  Headless, faceless, and often askew, these hapless house-bound women and men are overcome by dishes and drapery, and succumb to laundry and bubblewrap.  It’s a familiar madhouse — the dissarray amid domestic chores — but one where coathangers dance in anarchy.  There is a muted comic tone, except for that slight by persistent fear that things could go horribly wrong with a single slip up or drop of the toilet-paper roll.  (Below: Photographs by Jessica Bruah)

Think Globally, Act Locally by William Lamson [Watch the video]

Vital Capacity by William Lamson.  [Watch the video]

Duel by William Lamson. [Watch the video]

I particularly like the sense of the sterile (science) experiment in these experimental (art) films, and the execution — whatever the variables, be they bananas, needles, or balloons — comes to reveal a unique mix of whimsy and tragedy.  There are real, if anonymous, people, earnestly participating in these tests, and an undercurrent of quiet, societal violence and self-induced torture runs alongside the goofiness of these stages. Other pieces play with this what-will-happen attitude, with less alarming — even charming — results.  Either way, it is difficult not to grin while being pulled into continuous viewings of Lamson’s curious research.

[Mobil Sign] and [White Sign] Images by Derek Stroup

Derek Stroup’s digital manipulations are simple but just so smart.  I like his billboards, candy, and money images quite a bit, but his website has some wonderful drawings and paintings as well.

[Candy #5] and [$1US] Images by Derek Stroup

I always think it’s interesting to see what happens when artists go about something as natural and everyday-photographer as taking photos of their children.

The first time I saw Abelardo Morrell’s childhood images, I recognized the serene black and white, the cleverness of form and light.  Despite the very different subject matter, all that made Morrell’s familiar camera obscura and book photographs a wonder — it was all still in there, in these family portraits.  But, there is something different going on when one’s own family is the subject.  You can see it here.

There is perhaps nothing more personal than a photographer lending his so-often-shared view of the world to images of his children.

[Julian and Brady Sitting by Abelardo Morrell]

Fasten’s images aren’t so far off from your backyard snapshots.  But there is something that much more deliberate about them; they’re square and distant and framed.  There is certainly this sense of just what she says in her statement… the watching of this person as he negotiates the bit of world he has to explore in front of him (but within the watchful eyes of his caretaker).  The image of Zach alone on a swing could have come across as deeply melancholy, but no, I feel like we know mom isn’t far away.

Granted, Fasten’s Zach pictures aren’t all taken quite from this perspective of protective distance.  The breathtaking image Hair [below, top] is wondrous and bold, and not so different from the porcelain youths of Loretta Lux‘s photo-paintings [as in The Blue Dress, below, bottom].

But Fasten’s child is not some photographic statue.  That’s an unfiltered blast of light, revealing real skin and hair, and a clutter of out-of-focus beach-goers trotting about the background.

This balance between intimacy and distance, though, I think is particularly noteworthy.  It is probably a space only a parent could inhabit.

And maybe it’s the haircut or the sweaters, but there’s this wonderful timeless everychild in Morrell and Fasten’s kids and how they are portrayed.  I am certain I had that haircut once, or lack thereof, my hair bushy and unkempt.  I feel like I know how that sweater feels, and you probably do to.

Maybe most remarkable, the images really convey the persistent shortness of being so young.  It’s marvelous.

And again, maybe its the haircut.  But I can’t help think of young Danny in The Shining, looking at these young people.  Innocent but not innocuously so.  Inhabiting shortness.  Navigating the perimeter of the boundaries our parents have set, and brushing up against the dangers of going a step too far.

I think I came across Peter Snyder’s motorist photos before the similarly themed work of Andrew Bush, and maybe didn’t even realize they were different works when recalling these portraits of travelers framed by their car windows, when I wrote about the Vector Portraits.

Taking another look at Snyder’s series Idling, it’s clear that he is portraying a quite different component of the experience commuting by car.  Stop lights.  Intersections.  Traffic jams.  This work turns out to be much more in the tradition of Evans’s subway portraits… though of course those were portraits of people going somewhere.  These people are stuck — even if the subway ride was routine and passive and a period to be lost in thought.  Idling shows how travelers are forced into this passive, powerless state, even in the autonomous automobile.

It’s interesting to see that Snyder shows a number of people doing something else as they wait, grasping at something to do with their hands or occupy their minds — reading, eating, talking on the phone.  Otherwise, there’s a quiet desperation or an emerging tension in their faces; stir-craziness settles in.  Or at least, like Evans’ portraits, the face is so blank, one can project all sorts of things onto it.

Snyder writes of this work, “There’s a collective sense of living-as-waiting, a continual holding of the breath, in anxious anticipation of the next disaster. This is the big waiting — the stuck feeling, the giving over of control — that mirrors and sometimes leaks out into the small waiting for the light to change.”

Photographs by Alex Meriwether, 2008

As Labor Day signifies a forthcoming New England autumn, I look back to a Memorial Day weekend visit to the Massachusetts seaside town of Rockport, where slabs of stone extend along the seashore in heaps.  They look like an endless supply of beached whales, melting into the ground, beaten down by the sun, hardened into rock.  As they climb further up onto land, the rocks expand into more formidable figures.

I recall looking upon the tourists and visitors scrambling slowly across these rocky surfaces.  In multicolored summer clothing these abstract and awkward beings became the cliche uttered by every skyscraper observation deck visitor — “they all look like ants.”

But to be on the same plane as these ants, and in this natural setting that so overpowers them, the experience is much more surreal.

I of course couldn’t stop thinking about Youngsuk Suh’s series Instant Traveler — subtly manipulated digital images of natural wonders and hiking sites, overrun by visitors.  My snapshots of Rockport couldn’t capture the feeling of being in a Suh photograph, but that was very much what I felt.  His natural expanses are bleak and beautiful, sunlit with objective early-afternoon clarity; the people seemed air-dropped in — out of place and inconsequential extras.

[Arches National Park, Utah, 1] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2002

[Rocky Mountains National Park, Colorado] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2000

More of Suh’s photographs are available for viewing on his website.

Amy Stein photographed roadside motorists across the country in this series of flat tires and engine trouble, titled Stranded.  It’s interesting how much they shift in tone, one moment summoning pity, then suggesting a relieving solitude, or in another instance, depicting eye-rolling frustration.  Stein is pulled between capturing portraits of these encountered strangers and taking in the open landscape that dwarfs each car and passenger into anonymity.

I keep encountering Andrew Bush’s photographs in various corners of the internet.  His series Vector Portraits is instantly arresting, a beautiful sort of update of Walker Evans’ celebrated Many Are Called (quietly snapped images of the anonymous subway riders of the mid-twentieth century).  Evans thought himself an “apologetic voyeur.”  The images are cockeyed but exceedingly earnest, and are a joy to view. (A nice review of the Evans book, here.)

Andrew Bush is also depicting commuters, but in this age of highways and SUVs, he turns to the motorists of America’s roadways and peers into their windows to get a glimpse.  Everything changes at this speed.  Though the subjects are rarely any more aware of the camera, so it seems, than Evans’ often-dozing or lost-in-thought subway passengers, the process hardly seems subtle.  A flash brilliantly picks out the profiles of each of his subjects — it’s the blast of light that allows the viewer access to this otherwise sealed and private space.  Bush states that each portrait was taken at 50 to 70 mph — the background is thrust into blur, while each car is quite carefully framed (seemingly antithetical to making decisions at such speed).  In the end, Bush gets caught by the subject’s eye more than once. Moving alongside at equal velocity is the same as standing still, and its not such a private space after all.

[Woman rolling to a stoplight at Wilshire Boulevard and Lafayette Park Place
in Hollywood at 2:38-­2:39 p.m. on January 18, 1997]

In California photographer Richard Stultz’t series of shopping aisle imagery, Choices, well, the subject matter is hardly novel.  Product photography is everywhere, and artists have reflected on consumerism quite extensively.  Nevertheless, I sort of can’t get enough of his superbly executed contributions.  There is certainly the spirit of Gursky in these works, but I’d argue there’s a bit more tongue-in-cheek attention given to the barrage of branding, as in the particularly great Bountiful.

Stultz writes about Choices: “Beyond the astounding quantity and selection, retail displays are often visually interesting with striking design elements, color, and repetitive patterns. But as we shop and try to find the perfect product, we often don’t see the perverse beauty of these choices. These photographs describe what often passes without recognition; they capture our retail reality in a design context.”

I found Richard Stultz through Flak Photo.

Peruse more Choices on Stultz’s website.

[Faces] Photograph by Richard Stultz

Her series-turned-bestseller Monkey Portraits is what first put her on my radar (and I assume put her in many a spotlight).  My overall reaction was one of skepticism and general distaste — there was something just awfully cutesy and gift-book/stocking-stuffer about those funny-looking monkeys, even if there was something rather evocative in an individual image.  The technique is quite proficient, that is difficult to argue.  And Greenberg’s story as to where these pictures started — a chance photo of a monkey that was part of a commercial shoot, isolated on the white backdrop– is rather interesting.  She thought to herself, “Oh, this looks like something I’ve never seen before—a studio portrait of a monkey.”

That said, I think I was particularly frustrated when I discovered how little the nature and technique differs when she’s shooting magazine ads and celebrity portraits.  Her commercial work is viewable on her website, the wincing-ly and self-seriously branded manipulator.com (each page boasts, Jill Greenberg: The Manipulator). (Okay, I suppose I should note that I’m aware I write this commentary on a website called [Good Eye, Meriwether .com], and suspect that the dryness and humble self-doubt that I intend to be intoned along with the self-congratulatory nature of the literal website address is lost on most.)  There is an indistinguishable glossiness throughout… no clear differentiation of intent.  Her glowing air-brushing-in-the-21st-century trademark is very cool, appropriate for selling magazines, but if the intent is to just make cool pictures, of celebs and (sure, why not?) monkeys too, I’m not sure why I should care after three or four.

So why do I love her bear portraits so?

The series is called Ursine, and I’m not sure — am I just impressed with myself that I know what “ursine” means?  Like Monkey Portraits, I suppose many of these could appear on a cute dorm room poster, but I still feel there’s a tone of seriousness here which I can’t be bothered to seek out in the monkey pics.  That the bears are fairly nondescript and monochromatic, I’d argue that there’s more of a need to look a little closer.  The level of detail in Greenberg’s images is quite revealing.  And as she implies in the following interview excerpt, there are mixed responses to the character of bears: cuddly, grizzly, teddy, deadly, and so on.

“What’s interesting about the bears is that they’re trained to stand up and growl and look really scary and menacing, but when they’re doing it they’re totally silent. They’re just silently acting like scary grizzly bears. When I was shooting the bears, I was surprised that they’d often pose like cuddly teddy bears. I thought that was really cute and I liked the dichotomy between the two ways the bears could be. Their faces are so mushy. They can look like a growling bear at one moment and then a cuddly bear a moment later.” Excerpt from The Morning News; Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin.

Receipt art!

“Consider the conundrum of an airport Sbarro pizza joint printing “Please exercise regularly!” on its cash-register receipts. Such are the pleasures proffered by the pencil drawings and 16-mm. animations in Jenny Perlin’s “Flight,” which reproduce, at an enlarged scale, receipts collected while travelling.“  — New Yorker,  April 21, 2008.

From Danica Phelps to Dorothy Gambrell, art based on financial transactions has a lot of potential.  I like how an LA Times article describes Phelps paintings; I saw some of her work in a show in Boston years ago — series of delicate green and red stripes representing financial loss and gain throughout daily debt and earnings.

“Phelps manages to be self-reflective without lapsing into self-indulgence. She keeps the emotional tone of her work understated, but its intimacy and modesty pull us in close. Marking by hand the record of every dollar earned or spent, the chronicle of every day, implies movement through the world at a pace born of attention to the significance of small acts.“ — LA Times, May 5, 2006.

Phelps is represented by Judi Rotenberg.

Gambrell, on the other hand, maintains a personal blog in comic form, based on money spent on groceries, beers, and transportation (and donated by her readers).  There are several levels of detachment here, making the anecdotes all the more affecting when a moment cuts through the layers that separate the messiness of life and the crisp containment of life in internet comic form, as in the entry for 06.16.06.

Jenny Perlin (represented by Mireille Mosler Ltd.) has made an unexpectedly stunning short film in Flight.  It is a simple series of looped animations in which line drawings emerge one after the other, documenting receipts from airports all over the world.  Timestamps tell a story (certainly with a deadpan neutrality) of travel and grab-and-go fast food consumption.  It is interesting how much one can learn (both accurate and misleading) from a pocketful of receipts.  Relatively little information is really communicated, though her travels are compelling in how far-flung they seem to be.  Ultimately the piece cracks a smile only occasionally, as with the quirky Sbarro exercise remark.  Otherwise it is just information, but with a beguiling flicker of life.

I particularly just couldn’t get enough of the human element of the pencil line recreating the stilted receipt-printer letters and numbers, playfully animated, and given additional texture through the flicker of light and sputtering filmgrain.

These artists start with mundane transactions and filter them into personal statements of varying levels of revelation.  The transaction continually repeats itself.

It is significant, I think, that photographing the snow is one of the great Photo 101 challenges — light metering the gleaming landscape in a manner as to render it accurately, and not in muddied grays, is a dull (but useful) common assignment. It is truly a challenge to both photograph in the uncomfortable cold while adjusting for the dominant, detail-less white. But I guess this is what left me ambivalent for so long; the series can be viewed simply as an excercise, as cool, empty, and impersonal studies or camera tests.

The blank heaps of passionless snow may serve as a barrier, a homogenizer, but alternatively, they can be viewed as outlines — a fat highlighter moving along the landscape. Snow, in photographic reproduction as well as in life, becomes the great natural decontextualizer, painting out the background, making the sky and foreground uniform and flat. The world is limited to dark and occasionally colored shapes and the peculiar subtleties of that which the snow cannot bury completely — structures, living things, black simmering water on the pond — brought into crisp focus and thoughtful scrutiny.

[The New Yorker] wrote a while back on Robinson’s work: “For the past five winters, Robinson photographed landscapes from Colorado to New York so enveloped in snow that they appear almost blank. Her pictures zero in on what remains when the world turns white: a lakeside picnic table in its own snug furrow; a plot, outlined by black poles and yellow rope, crisscrossed by the tracks of solitary travellers. The patched-together wooden shack of an ice fisherman is fragile and forlorn in one image, but, seen from a distance alongside a scattering of similar shelters, it becomes part of a colorful toy village of Monopoly houses seen through a scrim of falling snow.“

Jon Feinstein describes his series Small Signs as as “a visual interpretation of the ominous intersections between man-made objects and our natural landscape.” It’s remarkable how much this very basic theme comes up in such different sorts of work throughout art history; it is such a basic concept and cliché. Nevertheless, it has been millennia since civilization has built itself up within the cycle of light and shadow and growth and rot. These conflicts are as relevant and contemporary as they are well worn.

I generally feel rather challenged by the artistic notion of the “landscape” — off the top of my head it seems so dull, the stuff of over-the-mantle, mountain-forest-and-trickling-stream painting. That which is described as “landscape” suggests to me a cookie-cutter and benign collection of hills and trees and rocks. There’s no sense of time, tragedy, or entropic anxiety in this; there’s no sense of the regrettable beaten path, no conflict.

Thinking upon past art history classes, the piece of “traditional” landscape that always stuck with me was The Ox-bow by Thomas Cole. I loved how much weirder it seemed than the typical river running through the woods, and particularly loved the term for this anomalous geological formation.

Upon closer look, it turns out that this classic piece, while singing Manifest Destiny in my head, is also in the business of describing and commenting upon the conflict of civilization and the natural landscape. The folks at Wikipedia write: “In returning to painting landscapes, Cole was faced with the dichotomy of the untamed wilderness and land cultivated by man. While other painters of the Hudson River School would merge the two peacefully, Cole did not shy away from portraying the two as opposites and showing how the cultivation would destroy the natural wilderness, and as a result never meet in the painting.”

What follows are several of Feinstein’s Small Signs, sequenced amongst the five-part series Thomas Cole was arduously in the midst of creating when he took a break to paint The Ox-bow. Cole’s series The Course of Empire is a fairly over-the-top and moralizing allegory of mankind’s insatiability and nature’s inevitable restoration of balance when balance goes off-kilter. Feinstein’s work is so subtle in contrast, and certainly not laid out in such a narrative arc; yet, in these works I find thought-provoking formal and thematic parallels.

I think back and remember that this nature vs. man-made dichotomy has made its way through my own artistic concerns, then disappeared, and recurred again, like Cole’s mossy, mountaintop plant-growth. I’m not entirely sure where this is all going.

My wife and I adopted our baby girl, Carmen Laura, from Bogotá, Colombia. While the courts processed her paperwork, we spent two months in Bogotá waiting to take Carmen home. Carmen’s birthmother gave her a book filled with letters, pictures and poems. “I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity,” she wrote, “When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things.” With those words as a mission statement, I began making my own book for Carmen. In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I’ve described some of the beauty in this hard place.
                                                                    — Alec Soth

This book is Alec Soth’s Dog Days Bogotá (also viewable on his website). It is a portrait of a city the viewer probably doesn’t know much about — a collection of portraits of the people he has met, as well as quirky and dingy interiors, happenings on the city streets, framed drawings and photographs on residential walls, an image of a chicken sitting on a chair, and — most compelling to me — recurring photographs of the dogs of Bogotá.

The project and its aims come together in these dog portraits. That Soth has succeeded at creating compelling, “serious” dog photography is impressive indeed. Shooting an adorable dog portrait is like snapping a breathtaking sunset; it can so easily come off as just another postcard — Wegman cutsiness is eagerly waiting in the wings.

These scruffy, lonesome dogs (almost all seem to be quietly roaming the streets, lying in the dirt) are depicted with dignity. They have suffered and endured mistreatment, perhaps, but are nonetheless proud.

I’ve never been particularly moved by “travel” photography — without a certain contextualization (such characters, a point of view, a setting), travel images can come off as just another National Geographic special.

Soth’s simple introduction, citing a very personal and almost noble motivation, combined with a wise and understated collection of images, communicates the “hard” lives of these strangers, without expecting pity. The subjects don’t need pity so much as they deserve respect. This is probably the goal of every National Geographic photographer (and I realize that is probably unfair to use “National Geographic” as an epithet) to describe “some of the beauty in this hard place” but I think it is notable to see this aim executed with the influence of the contemporary art photographer.

The straightforward, carefully composed, large-format color image, combined with a very personal project documenting a far off place, is an exciting meeting of intents (one could even term them “genres”). The cold documentarian quality of large-format falls away with this subject matter, particularly when we know the story of what these dogs and people and homes have to do with each other, and with the photographer.

A while ago I wrote a bit about the polaroid work of Mike Slack, but neglected to comment on his series High Tide. These polaroids have stuck with me; they are portraits, in a way, and are quite different from his other work. Photos of representations, they seem to be taken in front of television screens. Actors and actresses are caught in awkward blinks, glances to the floor, and moments of resonant emotion — yet it is difficult to distinguish exactly which is which. Each aims his or her gaze downward, as if in shame, or melancholy. Whether this is the part they are playing, we are not aware. With photography’s snap-and-grab capabilities, let alone that of the pause button, each moment becomes ambiguous, and the history of television seems to become an extended period of mourning or contemplation.

These came to remind me of the Lee Friedlander series Little Screens, probably among my favorite of his work. Friedlander photographs anonymous television screens (in lonely and cheap hotels, or homes so sparse as to resemble them) with clever, often stirring, scenes beaming into the largely empty room, charging the space with the glowing power of that sole isolated film frame.

Sort of like the Kuleshov effect in film editing, the little screens seem to comment directly on the goings on in the room we are sitting in, despite the blandness of each location. That man flickering onscreen smirks at the prominent toilet bowl, stifling some unnecessary bathroom humor.

Walker Evans described them as “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.”

And just to round out the trio, not quite so biting in its cleverness, but lovely and haunting to look upon (and interesting commentary on the eerie omnipresence of these “little screens” in our lives), Matthew Pillsbury is the photographer behind the series Screen Lives. Through long exposures the screens turn to blasting white, and illuminate the casual goings-on of the homes they inhabit, wherein people turn into ghosts.

I know little about Eugenio Tibaldi’s photographic work or career other than what I have recently stumbled upon online. I’ve been long interested in the careful removal of the (back/fore)ground in photographic work (but also drawing, painting). A floating set of objects, particularly on a clean white page, canvas, or semi-gloss surface, removed from context and just there to trigger whatever reactions it has built into itself… this is a visual tool that merits exploration.

Tibaldi paints white acrylic directly into his photographs, rendering them somewhere between photo, painting, and contour drawing; abstraction and landscape.

Fasnacht presents a collection of overhead views of urban clusters of highway, cloverleaf tangles, bridges, runways, on- and off-ramps in In Transit. They read as intensely hand-rendered satellite views, with much of the detached sense of awe and beauty that such entails. These are shapes sweeping over a plane, blood vessels pumping within a city’s rythmic pulse, ignorant of pollution, road rage, and and urban blight.

I like that Fasnacht’s work could be mistaken for a storyboard for an establishing shot of an L.A.-based television show, or an urban planner’s scheme for highway reconstruction. It’s not hard to imagine these marked-up sheets lying about a professional’s studio, waiting for the next step in the process, waiting to be approved. As they are, these transitways as art objects imply a sterility and refusal to offer judgment on Fasnacht’s part. The graphite drawings suggest a mild but persistant fascination with the way we get around, the shapes we spill all over our landscapes, but from a polite, formal distance.

Fasnacht’s single non-charcoal work in the show (it’s made primarily of tape on the wall) suggests a bit more outright awe in the geometric power of these winding roads. (I snapped the photograph of it, above.) A bit of research into her other current work in installation unlocks a playful and much less restrained artist, coordinating this withdrawn fascination with roads and buildings, with the clean gallery wall and a pliable nature of line and perspective. These other works also engage the dangers and potential catastrophes of these structures, suggesting this as a possible undercurrent in her other works.

To be honest, I barely got a look at the work of Barbara Moody, but it also made an impression. The gallery walls at Kingston were dominated by only a few works, stretching from floor to ceiling — drawings of what seemed to be enormous piles. It wasn’t readily clear what made up these heaps of things — a mound may resemble un underwater reef in its organic, dune-like stance, but this turns out to definitely be discarded stuff, one realizes, making out patterns and fabric and familiar forms.

Particularly shrunk down to fill a page, as seen here, the drawings take on the quality of a delicate illustration; I’m remined of illustrations by Mary GrandPre at the head of each chapter of Harry Potter. These could be heaps of playthings, from the corner of Raggedy Ann’s room. But sitting tall in groundless space of the gallery, they resonate like 2001‘s monolith, like the model mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In person these innocent beasts are all-consuming.

I love that the contents of these piles are ultimately inscrutable — they exist simply as this: heaps, remains, mounds — waiting. More of Moody’s images can be viewed on her website.

Though autumn has decidedly arrived in New England this week, my thoughts turn to August and a warm evening visit to Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor. This was not so long ago, but it begins to feel like a distinctly different era – this was an experience defined by the disposition of summer.

Boston’s ICA sponsored a series of installations on the Boston Harbor Islands this past summer, and offered a boat tour of the three sites on a series of weekend evenings. The experience of boating out into the harbor, speedily bouncing and splashing into the bright summer evening, was unique in and of itself. The first two islands were home to military ruins and a fort, but the artwork was underwhelming compared to the experience. None compared to the third island we visited, where we explored Teri Rueb’s project, Core Sample.

The history of the first two islands was worn pretty plainly on their sleeves; the civil war-era Fort Warren of Georges Island was particularly exciting to walk along, and duck into, wielding an imaginary sniper rifle. I imagined myself a version of Davy Crocket, or in one of my cousin’s WWII shooter games on his computer. Ultimately it was my amazement at the fort structure, and not the structure built by a design team within it, that became memorable.

Spectacle Island was different. What seemed like a charming little island-turned-park reveals itself to be home to fascinating layers of history, none of which are readily available to the naked eye. This is what Rueb’s work ends up being very much about. Spectacle was used for hunting and fishing by Native Americans for hundreds of years. Between fishing site and its use as a modern garbage dump for the citizens of twentieth-century Boston (and just another component of the horrendously polluted Boston Harbor), it was home to a quarantine hospital, a gambling resort (complete with illegal brothel), and a horse-rendering plant.

Spectacle was originally named for its shape – two mounds lifting up over the water’s surface like the unblinking lenses of spectacles – and its view of the Boston skyline has been written up by CNN (who probably hasn’t been the first to name it one of Boston’s “best-kept secrets”). After its many lives and services to the citizens of Boston, Spectacle now sits idyllically in the harbor, underneath the planes launching themselves from (and settling back down into) nearby Logan Airport. It has been reshaped and covered with landfill from the Big Dig; this process, and its part of Spectacle’s long history, are detailed on the Mass Turnpike Authority website.

We arrived at Spectacle and were presented with headphones attached to a GPS unit. When I put mine on I didn’t hear anything at first. We had only about half an hour to wander up to the top of the winding paths and back. Dusk had pretty firmly begun to settle, but Boston was still aglow on the horizon with pinks and oranges and so on. We started to crunch up the pathway, and sounds emerged from the earpieces. I won’t do the experience much justice trying to recall what happened when, and what the sounds were like. But it was surreal to step through space and feel the soundtrack changing with me. An airplane would shuttle through the earphones and I’d look up sure enough to see the sound reflected by life, an airplane passing nearby. And sometimes I’d look up and be so surprised not to see one; it was just in the art.

I tried to take photographs of the island, of the experience, or at least of my beloved city shining across the water. There was something rather perfect about my inability to get anything other than a set of blurry colors from it all – this wasn’t something to be accurately captured through documentation.

At the top of the trail was a gazebo, and here one would hear a recorded conversation of a man and a woman reminiscing on their experiences on Spectacle Island earlier in life. It is very conversational, and at times unclear what exactly they are talking about. Something about sinking a boat, at some point? The point was that these were the sounds of recollection and connection, the culmination of people coming together. It was difficult to concentrate on the content of the warm chatter, with Boston sitting under the dark blue sky to my left, just over there, and grasses waving about my feet, in the wind, like seaweed.

What does it mean to map an artwork? Here, the map becomes the only thing on paper about Core Sample. It refers to the winding experience, but only as a companion to the real life set of footsteps and global positioning data.

The notion I can’t get out of my head is how much it was like being in a three-dimentional computer game. Whether it’s Scarab of Ra from my childhood or that game Myst that my cousin and I tried but couldn’t ever quite get into, there’s something very cool, very unsettling and wonderful, about that liminal state of real and unreal – exploration with a soundtrack, unusual thumps, an island you have never seen before…. You are on a strange island. You found a gazebo. You hear an airplane. What do you want to do?