‘Laurie Frick: Quantify Me’
The artist as data, casting the metrics of her life in visual form
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., Jan. 27, 2012
'Laurie Frick: Quantify Me'
Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca, 477-1064www.womenandtheirwork.org
Through March 10
You can track just about everything you do in your life these days, using the Internet via computer or cell phone apps to generate charts of what you did, with whom, how much, where, when, and everything but why.
"Why?" is the question most often left to artists and philosophers, and the best answer is frequently "Why not?" Laurie Frick, on the other hand – the hand holding the pen and ink and glue and paper and so on – makes art from those very charts and tallies and what tech types like to call metrics. Frick takes her recorded and measured life and transforms it into visual representations made of thousands of laminate counter-top samples, of intricate collage, of thick laser-cut paper hangings that fill the middle interior of Women & Their Work for this one-woman show called "Quantify Me." It's a one-woman self-portrait show, specifically, because that's the artist herself you're looking at, made evident in visualizations of how much she slept each night, how much food she ate, how many calories burned, how many places visited, what her daily moods have been, and more.
Much of what we are, as R. Buckminster Fuller suggested of himself, is a verb; and here the relentless human verb has been transmogrified into the concrete noun. You're not just looking at parts of the quantifiable Frick, though, you're actually walking through the artist's data-centric incarnation as the cut-paper hangings form a many-layered maze in the midst of the gallery, the lacunae of each chart providing peepholes through which you can view the other charts, the collages, the other visitors, that one main wall completely covered with staggering spectra of laminate samples.
It's frickin' full-color. It's Frick, in full color.
For the art lover interested in methods of mapping personal activities, for the chart lover interested in aesthetic pleasure, we recommend that a visit to Women & Their Work's current show be one of the excursions recorded, soon, among your own array of metrics.
