TEDx Austin | February 2013 | The art of self-surveillance
Hartford Courant | Susan Dunne | January 2013 | Making Tracks at RealArtWays by Laurie Frick
Peter Frank Haiku review in Huffington Post | April 2012
The bricolage approach to sculpture – composing three-dimensional objects out of other, pre-extant (and probably post-functional) objects and materials – demands a deft formal sense and a very dry wit if it is not to descend into welded-tin-man bathos. “Death and Life of an Object” brought together three masters of the genre, almost challenging them to outdo one another. Indeed, all three, per their usual practice, went for spectacular results wrestled from single, notably obdurate things and materials. Tim Hawkinson transforms single materials, usually in great quantities, into unlikely measurements of his own body. Here, for instance, he fashioned cardboard into cross-sections of his hand and created a massive quilt embroidered with his own footprint. Lynn Aldrich conjured suggestive forms out of entirely non-suggestive elements, constructing lengths of bent drainpipe into a free-standing presence that seemed at once treelike and Medusa-esque. Her wall-hung accumulations seemed similarly menacing – in contrast to the antsy, chatty, gaily colored collages compiled by Laurie Frick, who also contributed a veritable mural of similarly charged color samples.
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Edward Cella Art + Architecture presents Death and Life of an Object, a three person exhibition featuring sculptures and installations by Lynn Aldrich, Laurie Frick and Tim Hawkinson. The transformation of everyday objects and materials into artworks has been a pursuit of all three artists in this exhibition. Whether they are materials found on the street, at a garage sale or at Home Depot, each of these artists has utilized the abundance found in a modern consumerist society to their advantage.
…Texas based artist Laurie Frick adopts a daily regimen of self-tracking that measures her activities and body, and in doing so shapes a vocabulary of pattern used to construct her intricately hand- built works and installations. Her quantifiable patterns, like her heart rate, the duration of her sleep or body weight are some of the metrics that inspire her colorful and complex works. In Walking, Week- 42, Frick constructs an immersive collage recording the length and directions of her daily walks with paperback book covers and scraps of paper she finds en route. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large format installation assembled from the surplus color and pattern samples of an Italian manufacturer of laminates. (more)
Every day, Laurie Frick takes a count of how many steps she makes. And every night, she slips on a sensor-equipped headband that tracks her sleep patterns.
Frick also makes notes of the food she has eaten each day, her mood, the time she spends online, the number of visits her website (www.lauriefrick.com) receives and from where those Web visits originate.
If all the personal data-collecting sounds a little neurotic, Frick is decidedly not at all neurotic in person — calm, personable, a thoughtful conversationalist.
Discussing “Quantify Me,” her current exhibit at Women & Their Work, the 56-year-old Austin-based artist couldn’t be more at ease, untroubled by the biological and psychological minutiae that she tracks and uses as the basis for her intricate pattern-filled installation.
“There are things about ourselves we measure all the time without realizing it,” she says with a shrug. “But what if you could live with that data all around you?”
And what if that data could be artfully displayed so that you could then adjust your behavior, tweek your daily habits? What if such self-surveillance were the norm? (To some people it is: Frick belongs to the Quantified Self community, a group of users and software developers interested in self-tracking. Discussions and meet-up groups around the world share info at www.quantifiedself.com.)
Frick transforms her personal data into an immersive installation at Women & Their Work. (more)
Austin Chronicle | Wayne Alan Brenner | Jan 27, 2012 | Laurie Frick ‘Quantify-me’
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. (more)
Austinist | Sean Ripple | January 2012 | Text based Q&A with Laurie Frick during installation
Sean Ripple is a very clever artist in Austin Texas. Or as it’s now known, ATx. He asked if we could just do a little exchange via phone text while I was installing. I got off the ladder and responded to his texts during the day. And he designed and built the article around that. So simple.
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CultureMap | Sofia Sokolove | Feb 1, 2012|’Quantify’ this: Artist Laurie Frick finds the beauty in scientific calculation
Multimedian Laurie Frick is one of those enviable geniuses whose right side of her brain is just as brilliant as her left. You know the type — they always made the best-looking collages in elementary school and were the first to memorize their multiplication tables.
With a background in engineering and technology, she works in the space between science and art, focusing on a theme important in both disciplines — patterns. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
There are the quantifiable patterns of small things we do everyday: steps walked, time spent on the computer, amount of sleep, calories ingested, mood, heart rate and weight are just some of the metrics that are easy to capture using high-tech gadgets and tech-savvy websites. And in some way these haphazard actions shape humanity; they add to our unique nature. This was the inspiration for Laurie Frick’s upcoming collection ‘Self-Quantifying Patterns’, where neuroscience meets art, the clinical meets the imaginative, and the system meets chance.
Frick began measuring her daily actions at Quantified Self, a website where people can self-track their experiences. There is a calculus to measuring our actions, and Frick’s work begins to ask the hard questions to determine exactly why this is. Her images appear both digital and organic, querying: Do we make our quantifiable patterns or do they make us? As the quantitative becomes qualitative, does this division even stand?
The collection is, above all, colorful and completely immersive, independent of its personal nature. Overall, the images are abstract and yet they function as almost a text-book depiction of data. The combo presents an explosive marriage of number and image, of science and art.
NPR radio on KUT Austin | Mike Lee | January 17, 2012
(click on link above to listen) Quantify me, a showing of works by artist Laurie Frick, opens at Women and their Work on January 14. Frick has used her background in science and engineering to create a series of works that visually depict her own patterns of sleep, exercise, mood, and other quantifiable patterns in her life.
Frick was inspired by her own tendencies to measure her weight, amount of sleep, and other quantifiable patterns as well as her observations of the growing trend of connected people to measure and report facts about themselves on a daily basis. In a society where real-time updating of foods eaten and locations visited, is it a stretch to think that our environments will come to be determined and changed based on such measurements? Frick thinks not, and has created an artspace that reflects that possible future.
Los Angeles Times | March 3, 2011 | Leah Ollman | Laurie Frick at Edward Cella – Cold Hard Data Gets Transformed (see full review here)
Laurie Frick’s first L.A. show, at Edward Cella, is an invigorating immersion in pattern, rhythm, repetition and variation. Her wall-mounted wood assemblages feel musical, above all, even if their basis is in science and the methodical collection of data. ….. Sounds dry, clinical, especially because data these days usually assumes materially formless digital form. Frick’s work, though, is insistently, beautifully analog, texturally rich and intimately keyed to the scale and touch of the human hand.
Frick, an L.A. native now living in Austin and New York, strikes a provocative balance between systems and intuition in this body of work. Her record-keeping brings to mind Danica Phelps, whose drawings monitor the incoming and outgoing funds in her private financial ecology, but Frick has perhaps more kinship with a figure like Fibonacci, the 13th century mathematician who famously elucidated links between a certain numerical sequence and patterns in nature. Frick’s works are delightfully elusive scores, wonderfully illegible texts. They have all the integrity of well-conceived, thoughtfully posed questions. more…
Might be Good | Wendy Vogel | Texas Biennial in Houston | April 2011
“Laurie Frick’s installation beckons viewers up Box 13’s dramatic stairs and onto the second floor. Resembling an overhead city grid created from cut-up pieces of discarded cardboard boxes, A long walk through cardboard is simple, site-specific and very engaging. I became fascinated in trying to decode the found poetry of her brand-name labels. Once on the second floor, my eyes traveled upward to the space’s composite board ceiling and tangle of spotlights, breaking the illusion of the piece in an unexpected yet honest way”… [more]..
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..New Scientist Magazine | Jonathan Keats | March 2011
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Engadget | March 2011 | Life’s most basic patterns displayed as color-coded charts | Darren Murph
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Artcritical | David Cohen | February 2011 | Sleep Patterns, Laurie Frick in LA
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LA Weekly | Feb 10, 2011| Shana Nyes Dombrot | This weekend gallery picks
The scavenger hunt for clues to the personality continues with Laurie Frick: Sleep Patterns at Edward Cella Art & Architecture. The links to neuroscience are entirely explicit in Frick’s large-scale sculptural constructions, which use individual objects as elements in an epic charting of human dream-time brain function.….
Laurie Frick crosses the line between neuroscience and art | Made in Slant | April 2011
壱日壱人 | Laurie Frick | April 2011
Booooooom | A blog about art | Laurie Frick | March 2011
Sleep Patterns | Artweek.LA | March 2011
10 minutes with artist Laurie Frick | Ennyman’s Territory | March 2011
More complicated than it looks | Olive Gold & Wine | March 2011
Interview with Laurie Frick | Little Pond | Rebekah Gainsley | March 2011
Quantified Self | February 2011 | Sleep Patterns by artist Laurie Frick at Edward Cella
Austin Studio Tours |September 2010 | Claudia Chidister & Paula Fontaine | Frick_AustinStudiotour_Sep10
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Catalog with essay by Kevin Brine | April 2009 | Laurie_Frick_Brine-essay_2009
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Abstract Art Online | December 2007 | Laurie Frick at Robert Steele in New York | Frick_NY Views_abstract-art-online
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