Laurie Frick, “Daily Time Slices Aug 25,” laser-etched wood blocks, pigment and aluminum on alumalite, 2014 (© Laurie Frick)
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through July 25, free
212-675-8672
pavelzoubok.com
www.lauriefrick.com
Earlier this year, the Guggenheim’s “On Kawara — Silence” retrospective highlighted the fascinating oeuvre of the Japanese Conceptual artist who detailed nearly every aspect of his life, keeping track of what time he woke up, who he saw, where he went, and what he did via notebooks, postcards, newspaper articles, telegrams, and date paintings. Former tech executive and engineer Laurie Frick takes that decidedly analog view of existence into the social-media-dominated twenty-first century with “Who are you? What day is it?,” an involving series of works that use data mining to create colorful depictions of time and personal experience by using rectilinear units of different color and size to indicate various activities and lengths of time spent on them. In “Time-slices,” the Austin- and New York City-based artist adapts data compiled by microbiologist Ben Lipkowitz, who exists on a twenty-six-hour sleep cycle, into wall sculptures of grids of small blocks of multiple sizes and hues arranged on shelves that suggest a kind of library. Another series, “7 Days,” follows the lives of a man and a woman in strictly linear fashion, forming a collection of narrow, vertical totems that evoke measuring sticks, taking stock of what these two people do on a daily basis for one week. And in “Leather Blocks,” Frick maps her own use of technology through Manictime, visualizing it as hundreds of tiny blocks winding across a wall. Using physically measurable objects that evoke such antique information technologies as children’s blocks and books on a shelf or even yardsticks, she simultaneously calls to mind the immaterial square pixels and blocks of digital information that our various apps use to analyze and show us our data. “Your job as an artist is to really pay attention to yourself, and sometimes those observations get eventually explained by science,” Frick said in a 2013 TEDx Talk in Austin. Frick, whose free FRICKbits app, “the ultimate data-selfie,” gives people the opportunity to “take back your data and turn it into art,” has done just that with “Who are you? What day is it?” First and foremost, it grabs your attention with its three-dimensional patterns and eye-catching color schemes, but upon further examination, it shares data that, although about other people, will make you consider your own use of time and technology. “I’m not naive about data privacy,” she says in the TEDx Talk, referencing various ways companies gather information about you. “My sense right now is, they measure me, now I measure me. You have data; I have data. Fight back!” Frick does just that, and makes it a whole lot of fun in the process.