On Andy Gambrell’s “Art for Humanity’s Sake”

 Last Wednesday, April 15, Andy Gambrell gave an art talk regarding his collection that is currently being exhibited in the Wriston Art Gallery. The collection is a series of paintings that Gambrell made with the use of a laser eye tracker, which he used to record the movement of his eye as he gazed at various American landscapes. The resulting paintings blend color and data to portray Gambrell’s physical experience of viewing these landscapes, delving into the artist’s interior experiences of the world around him.

                  Before having the privilege to watch Gambrell’s talk and its subsequent performance, the artist visited my morning class that same day. Knowing next to nothing about Gambrell aside from the work he has done, I was somewhat surprised by him. At first, he struck me as being remarkably ordinary, and in some ways, he is. What impressed me most about him immediately was his ability to talk to a room without filling his sentences with scripted language. Instead, he was truly interested in making connections with each person there. He discussed his process as an artist, how he arrived at making “Art For Humanity’s Sake,” moving between cities before settling in Wisconsin, the frequent difficulties of seeing things as they are, the necessity to leave the United States and experience other cultures, his discomforts in working with dancers for the first time, the limitations of capitalistic software and his fascination with color. By the end, most people just wanted to follow him around for the rest of the day for a chance to understand his mind and steal some of his wisdom.

                  During the talk, Gambrell provided some background on the series and discussed how his previous work, which largely used lines and colors to outline abstract shapes, led to his interest in the laser eye tracker. The eye tracker allowed him to break away from previous habits and limited his linework. Rather than using lines to outline confined shapes, the data from the eye tracker forced Gambrell to open up these shapes and connect the hotspots left behind by where his eyes rested on each landscape. Because of this process, the resulting abstract paintings could be considered landscapes themselves, or even self-portraits. 

The evening exemplified Gambrell’s true dedication to connecting with people and understanding the human experience. It was a hybrid blend between an art form that typically dissuades collaboration with one that relies heavily on both the performer’s embodied experience and their connection with others. It marked a period of successful experimentation for Gambrell, Gingrasso, the dancers and the audience members alike, each with their own motivations and their own takeaways. The use of the gallery as a performance space changed the energy of the room. The room itself felt much smaller, and less precious. Modern dancers often speak about ‘agitating the space’ as a way of imagining the body interacting with the floor, gravity, and the surrounding space as its partner. I’d like to imagine that this agitation of the space affected even the viewers of the work who didn’t get to see the performance itself.