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.

Last week at the South End’s gallery openings on Harrison Avenue, I came to the conclusion that a couple of the most arresting pieces were executed (not by video or large-format photography, but…) by charcoal drawing. Heide Fasnacht (at the Bernard Toale Gallery) & Barbara Moody (at Kingston Gallery) made work that was simple, fresh, and memorable.

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into her other current work in installation unlocks a playful and much less restrained artist, coordinating this withdrawn fascination with roads and buildings, with the clean gallery wall and a pliable nature of line and perspective.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.

It is just past dusk, and the wind is brisk and full of that sea smell. Weeds are doing that playful windy weed thing. Gravel crunches beneath; planes roar overhead; magical and mystical echoes are all around.

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?

Last spring I visited The Strand, and in hurriedly viewing the art books while my friends waited for me outside, I came across a collection of polaroids by Mike Slack. In some ways maybe there’s nothing much special going on in Slack’s work — but it’s exactly this, his simple rendering of these objects, horizons, pavement surfaces, and how the images come together like calmly interlocked fingers — well, it may seem overdoing it do call them devestatingly good, but that’s my reaction to the uncomplicated depicted with such respect. The polaroid imperfections, particularly an occasional bias towards yellow, magenta, or cyan, lend a specific, haunted texture; there’s an immutable silence to these cut-out, navel-gazed locations.

In an interview, Slack described his preference for the polaroid camera as such: “It’s portable and uncomplicated. I can make images quickly and easily. The feedback is immediate. I also like the fixed size of the images (3″x3″) and the fact that there’s no negative to print multiples from – you get one positive image and that’s it. You can’t reproduce the thing. In that sense, there’s an existential purity (or something like that) to Polaroids that you don’t find in other types of photography. This is an important part of it for me – the camera as existential device, a way to really zero in on the present moment. It’s also a challenge to make really thoughtful, precise images in a medium normally considered cheap, disposable and lo-fi.”

“I get into this headspace sometimes when even the most familiar, mundane objects seem utterly profound, and I think my best pictures capture that weird profoundness. It’s almost like the camera has taught me how to look at things in this way… In a broader sense, I think the Polaroid camera and self-developing film were in fact originally conceived and designed to give non-photographers a means of engaging photographically with the world, which is very interesting to me. It provides a way of seeing things, documenting your waking life.”