At times, Thomas Bangsted’s hypnotic, hypercalculated pictures of boats nearly resemble paintings. The water’s smooth variance in tone looks handmade; its ripples are often intensely gestural. Indeed, the images suggest deadpan hallucinations, as though the boats are toys in a twilight zone.

In three of the seven images in this show, Bangsted portrays deserted ghost ships, historical relics of the two world wars. These depictions have been digitally altered—Bangsted has added the hard-edge, geometric patterning of dazzle camouflage. The boats are no longer rulers of the sea but vessels stranded near the land, technologically obsolete emblems of perverse nostalgia. Bangsted himself is caught up in nostalgia—it permeates his images. The ships are period pieces, and the black-and-white photographs look dated, suggesting everything in the past, including art, can be relived.

Appearing in two of these images is a man named Mike. He is a Michigan-based antiquarian who makes antique-style rowboats, and Bangsted hired him to pose in one of his handcrafted dinghies. In one black-and-white image, Mike, 2013, he appears alone in the broad sea, dressed in vintage workman’s clothes from the Edwardian period. In another, SS Coeur d’Alene (Under Refit for Troop Transport), 2012–14, he is similarly attired, and the dinghy is positioned near an antique steamship. The retro look seems to go hand in hand with feelings of isolation and solitude—which Bangsted himself experiences, for Mike is his surrogate. But there’s something very theatrical about it. We are in a kind of theater of the absurd.

In such works, the dazzle camouflage transforms the military vessels into abstract constructions that contrast with the fluid abstraction of the sea. Black and white planes eccentrically alternate yet cohere; it’s as though the ships have become optical illusions—Op art—even as they remain tidily streamlined. The dynamism of the camouflage and the passivity of the ship are inseparable.

Salvage, 2011–12, a photo of a pickup truck loaded with tires, suggests that all of Bangsted’s photographs are attempts to salvage the past, including the dead art of yesteryear, even though history may feel like a morbid junkyard. Whether Bangsted succeeds in raising the dead from their graves or whether his photographs are their gravestones is unclear. The boats no longer have any aggressive purpose. They seem to suggest, with a sense of futility—implicit in the feelings of isolation and solitude—that there will always be violent wars. Bangsted’s warship photographs are antiwar, even pacifist, statements, for the ships are shown “at peace.”

—Donald Kuspit