DED

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.