Sorry We Missed You

It seems Jackie Furtado has spent the last two years honing in on everything photography can do, with one caveat: no pictures, please. Which is to say no photos where there is an easy subject, something to look at or feel for. Her thesis, permeated with recorded sounds of airy traffic, consists of a frame fastened to the wall wherein scenes from a house pass by; and the restrained choreography of a car cover in slideshow. Description is important, as is sequence — Furtado will nudge you closer and closer to a concrete wall, a wrinkled tarp, or a clogged air grille, materializing presence through a deep attention to mundanity’s textures. But her progression is not that of those coolly serial 1970s conceptualists — in the wan light, across crummy surfaces, romance holds out: for unexpected, daily formalism and the friends that help her make the work. Perhaps it’s her past life as a portraitist coming through.

Flitting past on a durable BNC monitor are shots of the car cover, flapped open inches from the camera and arrested mid-billow. Spring clamps and S-hooks dangle from the ceiling as the cover is hoisted into various topographies. There is a simmering suspense to the hands grasping into the frame, as well as in the recurrence of the cover’s “pocket” for the side-view mirror (a void within a void) — but no bigger narrative. Halfway through, the tarp floats triumphantly but just as quickly crumples and is taken away. Next to the monitor is a skeletal, welded car frame, which never once figures in the images. Anonymous drivers gun their engines and the unfailing skip and clank of metal plates on a bridge fill the room. No stopping. Just a relentless going.

You could run your finger along the sill of Furtado’s picture window and pick up a fresh layer of grime. There is so much specificity in this window. The chipped paint and the colonial muntin suggest that it is an old New England window that lifts with a slight sash cord buoyancy and lands with a wooden thunk. The screen is in focus and reflects light in blunt patches, and the rubber weather seal at bottom right has slipped off. Some depth is perceptible in the dark beyond, but not much. Furtado cultivates such meditative, textural focus that when the cats show up it’s almost shocking. Here is a suddenly living thing, warm and curious and nuzzled by a friend.

As the photos change daily, you get a piecemeal sense of a life passing through that window. There’s nothing grand about it, though the feeling is marvelously complete, akin to staring into space after a busy day and noticing how green the tree outside your window is. William Carlos Williams does this. Some reflected branches show because the white curtain has been pulled across, then dissipate wispily against the glass in the next image. Just as the sequence begins, it ends: emptied, you and the window.

Furtado is attuning us to a discreet texture of time. Her sculptural moves are exceedingly basic: relying on gravity for the tarp, spackling the frame to the wall to suggest some architecture. Her meticulous formalism momentarily frames life, though it never stays. Some feeling is left in the lines, the texture, the light — the irony being that these are beautiful pictures — though perhaps what’s more pronounced is their remaining aloneness. Restraint against malaise, joy in precision — Furtado’s new work has yet to settle; the irresolution, however, is enthralling.