Sheila Gallagher Gallery Opening

Sheila Gallagher, Matthew Littell’s wife and important FOU*, is being exhibited in Chelsea gallery show opening on Friday. The exhibition features new and more comprehensive work from her “eye-catching” series, several of which are owned by Utile, Inc. 

From the Cynthia Reeves exhibition announcement:

Sheila Gallagher’s Hand-Eye series presents viewers with abstract, yet undeniably figurative, images of female athletes. The drawings appear elegant and yet their compositions consist of many choppy, broken, or disjointed lines. The graphite’s greatest build-up on the paper corresponds with areas where the figures’ bodies have the most detail, the face and the hands, for example.  In certain examples like Sada Jacobsen, above, the graphite’s heavy density totally obscures the figural details, helping create the tension between realism and abstraction, embodied by these works.

To create the “drawings”, Gallagher projects images of female athletes onto a large screen at Boston College’s Eye Tracking Lab. Every 20 milliseconds two infrared sensors record her eye movements as  x and y coordinates while she attempts to draw the figures directly with her eyes. The data is initially gathered as numerical text and then translated into a CAD program, which allows the temporal sequence to be plotted as a single unbroken line drawing.

*Friend of Utile

-Tim