NYAB Event - Laurie Frick “Who are you? What day is it?”

Laurie Frick “Who are you? What day is it?”

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

This event has ended.

Pavel Zoubok Gallery invites you to a solo exhibitions of new sculptural work by LAURIE FRICK. Frick creates personalized data portraits by mapping the temporal patterns found in our daily activities.

In her many lectures on big data and everyday life, LAURIE FRICK stresses the standard medical evaluation of a head injury. The first two questions asked of a concussed patient are “Who are you?” and “What day is it?” One’s response to this pair of questions establishes their cognitive health, as well as the operative philosophy of Frick’s work: well-being and self-awareness are tied to one’s place in and use of time. Rendered in chromatic scales, the patterns that emerge are quantified, abstract portraits that are at once empirical and ephemeral. By visualizing personal data, Frick’s motley assemblages of paper, wood and leather pose a simple yet profound question: Will tracking time help us understand who we are?

Who are you? What day is it? presents three series of works derived from data-tracking that monitors individual time use. Time-slices visualizes the quantified life fastidiously self-tracked by Ben Lipkowitz on his website www.fennetic.net. By combing through six years of his meticulously annotated graphics, Frick reveals a portrait of a man who lives on a 26-hour sleep cycle. What we see in this unconventional calendar is an individual slightly ahead of the curve, whose expanded use of the day moves in a strangely beautiful pattern. A second body of work, 7 Days, consists of color-coded data tracking two individuals: one male, one female. Portraying these unnamed individuals as days of the week, these fourteen totems present a less consistent pattern than one would expect, implying a use of time and a self-description that defies simplistic description. The final series, Leather Blocks, hits closest to home, using software called Manictime to chart a continuous, squiggly pattern mapping the artist’s daily technology usage. The tangle of boxes meandering along the wall present the artist’s technological engagement in fits and starts, suggesting that a studio process which moves in and out of cyberspace can indeed be termed manic time.