Lifeloggers opens at Elmhurst Art Museum

How do you track your life? Some people count calories; others count the steps they take every day. Many people spend time on social media, detailing their lives and finding out about other people. A new exhibit at the Elmhurst Art Museum, LifeLoggers: Chronicling the Everyday, takes the minutia of everyday life and turns it into art.

LifeLoggers: Chronicling the Everyday, is described as “the extensive documentation of one's personal experience. Previously the domain of scientific research and recently individual health and fitness analysis, the impulse to track, map and graph now animates artistic practice. The thirteen artists in this exhibition produce work in different media--from low tech to high tech--that demonstrates the chronicling impulse, not as an objective record of every second lived, but as a thoughtful and studied approach to revealing the complexities of human existence.

The thirteen artists featured in LifeLoggers: Chronicling the Everyday, took data previously only of interest to scientists and created an artistic expression of their lives. As the Elmhurst Art Museum press release explains, “works of art: Suzanne Szucs chronicled the passage of time through fifteen years of Polaroid self-portraits and Clive Smith painted miniature self-portraits on wood blocks every day for a year. Others recorded belongings or surroundings: Jennifer Dalton documented both market and sentimental values for everything she owned at a particular time in The Reappraisal, and Elise Engler archived all of the things she carried while traveling in a series called Suitcase Drawings. Stephen Cartwright charts his movement through the world around him, logging his longitude and latitude every hour of every day to translate the numerical data into kinetic sculptures, and Nathalie Miebach transforms scientific weather data into colorful, woven sculptures and musical scores. These and other compelling works by Leona Christie, Richard Garrison, Katie Lewis, John Peña, Madelyn Roehrig, Renato Umali and Jorinde Voigt explore the many ways lifelogging has entered contemporary art practice.”

As with all Elmhurst Art Museum exhibitions, there are free public programs to expand on the exhibition’s concepts. For more information visit http://www.elmhurstartmuseum.org/.