THE LARGE SCALE and expansive scope of Thomas Wrede's landscapes in "Adrift" at the James Nicholson Gallery make them remotely reminiscent of work by renowned fellow German photographer Andreas Gursky. But while Gursky digitally oversaturates his images with points of perspective, rendering them hyperreal and sublimely overwhelming, Wrede distills the vanishing point from his pictures by allowing the horizon to recede into oblivion. When it's most successful, the effect cuts his images loose from any stable vantage and presents not only his subject matter but also his viewpoint as wandering and lost. The figures in Beachwalkers and On the Beach stroll along impossibly broad expanses of sand, divorced from any determinate context as if in scenes from a science fiction movie. And the waders of In the Water drift through an apparently endless three-foot-deep sea. The formal abstraction of these pictures gives them an existential weight. They aren't studies of landscape per se but psychological studies, which employ natural settings to articulate experiences of isolation and aimlessness with almost metaphysical proportions. Other pictures in the show play with perception and the boundaries between reality and artifice. For Queen Mary 2 and The Sailboat, Wrede has manipulated the lenses of his camera to give his images a distinctly unnatural air. The enormous ship at the center of each picture is in focus, while the surrounding sea and sky are blurred, so that the ships look like toys or miniatures in a diorama. Fir Trees (Panorama) and Fir Trees (Crater), on the other hand, appear to be aerial photographs of barren, snow-covered mountains speckled with a few hearty evergreens. On closer examination, however, one sees that the trees are too big for the mountains. And, it turns out, the pictures are actually of miniature plastic trees on the same expansive beaches as the show's other landscapes. Wrede's work wanders not only through underdetermined boundaries of space but also along the uncertain boundaries between the real and the fantastic in the construction of experience. Tues.-Fri., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 49 Geary, fourth fl., S.F. (415) 397-0100, www.nicholsongallery.com. (Clark Buckner)