Image of “Grid of Six” by Kathleen Shafer

In an interview published in Whole Earth Review back in the summer of 1989, acclaimed science fiction and cyberpunk author William Gibson (who we caught up with last week during his U.S. book tour) commented regarding his work: “The world we live in is so hopelessly weird and complex that in order to come to terms with it, you need the tools that science fiction develops.” Or, often enough, it is visual art that frames our complexities and provides the tools, as with the work in Fall Solos 2010, on display at the Arlington Art Center through November 7.

Kathleen Shafer, the Trawick Prize’s Young Artist Award winner of 2007, presents an engaging spatial study of the geographies of airfields. Her photographs of landing strips and control towers aren’t particularly exciting on their own — they gain momentum as diptychs or combined into grids with her angular diagrams that selectively delineate the unnaturally straight lines of the photographed scenes. Together, Shafer’s work seems to simultaneously propose documentary materials and science-fictional allusions.