Tom Fruin gathers the cast off rubbish he finds on his walks around the streets of Manhattan’s lower east side and stitches together this odd collection of drug bags, cigar bands, fragments of scribbled notes and assorted ephemera into quilted matter. He has called the discards he works with “crops” and they furnish him with an urban harvest, with which he refashions a territorial map or sociological portrait of a particular neighborhood documenting its human behaviors.

“Wandering through the back alleys and parks, studying the refuse of New York, I find signifying detritus that I reinterpret and re-present in a way that communicates both my investigation and the cultural weight imbued in these forgotten items.”

Fruin’s works are full of visual puns and nuanced references. The configurations and arrangements he makes with his materials stretch the theme of the modernist grid, while simultaneously subverting the concept of the quilt as an object of material comfort. His use of recycled trash and in particular drug bags have been described variously as beautiful, metaphorical and exploitative- and this range of responses to Fruin’s work adds to the discussion about the function of art to enlighten our attitudes and question our received opinions.

Tom Fruin is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara. He lives and works in New York. His works were recently included in “Over and Over: A Passion for Process” at the Andover Gallery of American Art; “Extreme Materials” at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY; and “Mine” at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. This is the first show of his work in Boston.

Sheila Gallagher: Hand-Eye

On view in the gallery project space will be new drawings by Sheila Gallagher. To create this series the artist projected images of female athletes onto a large screen in the Eye Tracking Lab of Boston College. Every 20 milliseconds, two infrared sensors recorded the artist’s eye movements as x and y coordinates while she drew the figures directly without allowing her sight to vary away from her subject. The data gathered was then transposed into numerical text and translated into a CAD program allowing the temporal sequence to be plotted as a single unbroken line drawing.

In the past, Gallagher has worked in a variety of media with the result that her work in general has been difficult to profile. However, whether in her installations, videos, paintings or drawings, issues of perception and the complexities of vision have always been at the forefront of her concern. Her earlier magic eye drawings used computer algorithms to embed hidden images behind recognizable patterns. And her continuing interest in the intersection between the seen and the unseen has inspired her use of laser routers and other technological devices to create simulacra of miracles, challenging the means by which we discern reality. The artist’s hand-eye drawings currently on exhibit come out of her long history of teaching students who are increasingly bound to computer technology to verify the experience of perception. This autumn Sheila Gallagher’s work will be featured in the up coming “Artist Prize Exhibition” inaugurating the new home of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. Sheila Gallagher received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is an Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Boston College where she teaches painting, drawing and new media.