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DED

Martine Syms

2021 00:15:35 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

An avatar, created through a 3D scan of Syms, navigates a plain and vast virtual landscape, the perspective sometimes floating above, sometimes alongside, as she progresses through a perpetual cycle of death and resurrection. Her avatar's journey seems to reflect the spectacularly confusing or nonsensical experience of inhabiting a body during a time of violence and illness that has unceasingly threatened notions of stability and consequentiality, forcing ever-evolving tactics of survival. How can despair and suffering in their many forms—as encountered by an individual, a community, a world —be reconciled with the motions and routines of daily living, and with even, necessarily, finding humor and grace in this living? Set against a glow of light that transforms from dawn to dusk, and juxtaposed with a soundtrack of bright pop vocals, the artist’s voice intoning sincere, mantra-like phrases, Syms’s avatar rises and reconstitutes, unfailingly, each time.

About Martine Syms

Martine Syms obtained a MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (NY) (2017) and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL) (2007). Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.