Sequence—a long-form project released by Hevey in the early days of fxhash—highlights two core premises of my collecting: that art is deeply personal, and that data is beautiful.
I was an undergraduate history major, so it came as a bit of a surprise that data ended up playing a major role in my life. I spent my early career after college writing about data and turning raw, chaotic sets of numbers into visually compelling graphs that we could use to tell stories and advance the mission of my organization.
During that time, I worked on projects drawing from a range of sources: apartment rental records, World Series game logs, socioeconomic statistics on the spread of urban blight in Baltimore, consumer credit scores, and everything in between. You name it, I cleaned it, parsed it, visualized it, and helped build narratives around it.
That work—the painstaking effort in Excel, the constant tweaking of colors and settings, and the endless search for better sources—predisposed me to fall in love with Sequence.
To me, each Sequence is a data visualization made up of individual colored points arranged in columns and lines. The project captured my imagination and attention right away, as I saw myself and my work reflected in the art.
Intentionally or not, Hevey is a data visualization virtuoso.
Sequence #48 and DNA Sequencing using GEL
Each piece in Sequence contains hundreds of thousands of individual data points. Hevey’s algorithm imbues each of those points with vibrant color and lays them out in beautiful patterns that suggest everything from the human genome to an intricately woven piece of fabric.
Sequence #251 and woven fabric
One of my favorite pieces in the entire collection patterns the points in a way that immediately reminds me of a simple friendship bracelet like the one my wife made for me in college.
Friendship bracelet and Sequence #84
Hevey’s remarkable ability to turn raw data into a series of works that evoke such a wide range of associations in my mind makes Sequence a project I continue to come back to. I’m just thankful that the artist brought it into the world for all of us to enjoy.
