LOS ANGELES — As far as self-portraits go, Martine Syms’ video “DED” is a bit self-deprecating. The artist’s digital her avatar roams a flat, featureless frontier, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a kitchen knife. A crippling, deadly allergy. Explosive diarrhoea, soar into the air like a rag doll and fall to your death. Then somehow I get up and keep walking.
Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently at the booth of Little Dom’s, a red-sauce darkwood Italian restaurant in the city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. But I understand how people don’t understand, they’re like, ‘Oh my god [expletive] this is? Really violent. I don’t like watching you die.”
But that’s the problem, she told me. “A lot of the things I do always read with a level of seriousness that isn’t always relevant.”
Especially when race is involved. “I use blackness, a signifier that connotes severe pain,” she admitted. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”
Sims, 34, is a sort of “new media” artist who makes the term obsolete. Ever since I was working as a film programmer at clubs like Echo Park Film Center In Los Angeles, she turned a variety of media lenses to find out what society expects from black women, especially black artists. It consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue about a race between two competitors in The Real World. Sims studied film at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a bookstore called Golden Age, and started an imprint of her books by an artist named Dominica. She has been tagged as an artist, author, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker, and more. DJs, influencers, brands. Throughout her art, her moving images feature an avatar of herself that gives her a key mixture of ego and fatigue, cupid and love.
In the summer of 2017, Syms graduated from Bard College with an MFA. That autumn she spent her year California College of the ArtsDuring that time she produced solo exhibition MoMA — A purplish installation that includes photographs, furniture and feature-length videos.
This fall she will bring a triad of organized coups and a film in theaters.Each star is a dramatized and extrapolated version of The Sims. “Neural Swamp” Until October 30th at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.And a gonzo sitcom called “She went crazy” Sims’ frequent appearances 2015-2021 are on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through February 2023. “Life Story” TikTok Posted by rapper Lil Nas X.
“DED” is a representative work of Sims University “Grio College” Retrospective at CCS Bad Hessel Museum, upstate New York. The artist’s alma mater, Bard, also inspired her first foray into independent film. Rocket Kaleshwill premiere in New York on September 16th and will be distributed worldwide. Bridget Donahuea Sims New York dealer, and Al Steiner Her former teacher and has a small role as a professor at the palace. )
Syms’ many avatars are chronicles of survival in a brooding media atmosphere. Inevitably so, in psychoanalysis and in self-care methods. The artist’s experience on the MFA track gave rise to the concept of a ‘Griot College’, a place to teach the knack of honing personal experience into contemporary narratives. In his notes for the press of “The African Desperate,” Sims wrote that racism is entwined in the overlapping dystopias of the advanced arts colleges in his idyllic Hudson Valley. In one of his final sequences in the film layer, postcard-perfect shots of fields and shops in Troy, New York, we find the voice of a man whispering to his stalwart co-workers.
“The curriculum she presents is larger than what colleges typically cover,” he said. Hessel Chief Curator Lauren Cornell“It encompasses an entire life, friends, thinkers and culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators. Where she lives becomes a set and a setting.
Sitting in a booth at Little Domus on the outskirts of Hollywood, Sims’ lavender tank top was layered with daylight orange braids and accented by a tattoo of the word “EVIL” on her shoulder. was (From some angles, it’s like “LIVE.”) Waiters in the hall hit small flies with the loud clatter of electric rackets.
Sims grew up in Altadena, a quiet town bordering the mountains east of Los Angeles. This quiet town is known as a rough-and-tumble billionaire lair and a black middle-class enclave. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at Kaiser Her Permanente Hospital on Sunset Boulevard. Sims took the bus to Los Angeles and spent the afternoon reading her Goodwill and Skylight books and watching a movie at a vintage theater. Her work conveys the kinetic severity of the city. Her character gets on a bus. they walk through los angeles
But virtual registers are important to Syms and her version. In some of her videos, the character’s text pops up on the screen in bubbles. Her 2018 work “Mythic being” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she collected text messages, voice memos, and memos from her phone, piecing together how ideas merged into art. Consistent with her hybrid way of embodying, refining, and recalling thoughts.
Syms traces the cause of ‘DED’ to a dream she had in early 2020 when she had Covid. It’s stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of her debut 2021 show, “Loot Sweets,” comes from another fantasy. She launches her notebook app. Bards and Others. Lauren and I are trying to escape. People are looting, so stop at Pleats on the way. All gone. At least all the good ones. While I crawl down to meet her, Lauren falls from her second floor into the ocean. she swims with me She is stronger against currents. We finally got out and I was shot dead right away.
It’s heavy, a nightmare fueled by civil unrest caused by police killing unarmed black Americans against the simmering backdrop of a global pandemic. Explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “booty sweets,” including Bobby McFerrin’s cover of The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Reparations. While artists and activists are calling for an end to the exploitation of Black Death imagery, Sims turned to gallows humor.
But Sims digs for a vein of absurdity hidden in the mundane spectacle through freewheeling experiments in black culture, like Amiri Baraka’s poetry and Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013 she wrote “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” Deflate Afrofuturist esotericism and other escapism. Instead, she suggests:
Curator Meg Onri including Sims in the 2019 exhibition “Time for Colored People” At the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, he told me the text underpins Shaw’s view of “the confluence of temporality, blackness, and the mundane.”
“I love her ability to steer away from conversations about the future of Black people centered around the fantastic and spectacular,” Onri added, adding, “Remembering that our future may not look very different from the present. I will let you,” he added.
Syms pointed out that her avatar in “DED”, Teeny, doesn’t actually die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt says TO HELL WITH MY SAFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying a world that is often terrible.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Neural Swamp, a glowing green installation, mounts the faces of two women on monitors and is positioned around a vinyl pouf. The third screen shows footage of her vintage video game round of golf. Scores and performances are always corrected in real time. Digitized actors recite a script written by Sims, while the algorithm is constantly updated to become a fusion of sitcom clichés and tongues.
Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles a Chicago installation, both of which are reminiscent of another Sims creation. Supper club sponsored by Prada Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair. Donahue said her vision for the brand “HelLA World,” which she called “Prada Mode,” included “every detail, from the lecture series to the matchbook.” Her name hung on the restaurant’s marquee, and her DMs from guests hovered around long screens in her dining room and projected onto monitors suspended on exposed studs between the restaurant and the outdoor bar. Her video of her circuit closed to the crowd. “
Maybe it’s also a metaphor: there are pillars, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. .
I asked Sims why she still works as a gallery artist, given her dynamic range. She said that a lack of intuition could receive such serious support. Centrum Paul Klee Instead of staying in Bern, Switzerland, and showing slides of her old work, she asked the host to serve her a purple cocktail at the bar. I spent hours ago helping you get the colors perfect.
“If you tell someone you want to run Little Doms as an art project for a month, they probably can,” says Syms.