MARTINE SYMS

The show’s title, Loser Back Home, deliberates upon ‘dysplacement,’ a term createdby historian Barbara Fields to describe the destruction of place and the loss of ashared sense of connection to one’s familiar or home country. In one of Syms’ newvideo works, This Is A Studio (2023), the artist uses surveillance footage that capturesa late-night police visit. This document raises questions about home, belonging andsystems of power—concerns that reappear across the exhibition.

In another new video, the two-channel i am wise enough to die things go (2023), Symsexplores the idea of psychosis through an unnamed protagonist reciting a monologue.Responding to the work of iconic animator Chuck Jones, Syms transfers the form andnarrative structure of an animated short into live-action. Working with the inherentchallenges and restrictions brought about by this sort of translation, she delves intoboth the breaking up of images and the breakdown of the psyche. Through a series ofvisual gags and special effects, and an original score, the work evokes the experienceof disorientation that results from being ungrounded.

Clothes, which Syms often designs herself, offer the Los Angeles-based artist afurther medium through which to examine the figure. Historically, the fields of sewing,film editing and computer programming are linked; all were initially consideredmonotonous and menial work and, therefore, positions often occupied by women. In iam wise enough to die things go, the actor wears a T-shirt that reads ‘To Hell With MySuffering’—a piece of clothing that has been worn by Syms’ digital avatars in previousvideos. In reference to an Arthur Rimbaud poem on freedom and the discrepancybetween desire and reality, the T-shirt defiantly declares ‘Being patient and beingbored / Are too simple. To the devil with my cares.’ For her textile paintings, an arrayof previously worn garments—including screen-printed T-shirts, baseball caps and sweatshirts, some branded with high fashion labels—are stitched together intotapestries and stretched over metal frames. Taking on a totemic quality, the paintingsbecome offerings of past, projected and shadow selves.

In the upstairs gallery, Syms presents Dream about the forrest fingering me from bothends (2023), an installation comprising a large wall-based photocollage and intricatelaser-cut sculptures that draw on moving boxes, ubiquitous commercial packaging andthe folds of origami. The video The Fool (2021), playing on a screen housed in acustom cardboard television box, melds varied footage while a narrator describes abrief encounter with a former love interest. A performance of a gymnastics routinemerges with iconic Baroque paintings; club scenes mix with a day at the beach. Takingthe viewer on a hazy, dream-like journey, the images at times seem to illustrate thestory being recounted but elsewhere fail the narrator entirely: in one surreal moment, alarge fig tree rolls across a hallway on a skateboard.

For the photocollage and sculptures alike, Syms has amassed a library of images in asimilar vein to stock photography banks, compulsively photographing everyday objectsand settings, such as buildings, cars, mountains and flowers. Sourcing from thisphotographic research as well as from her own collection of ephemera, Symstransforms the material of everyday life into a visual field rich with personaliconography, poeticism and play.

Martine Syms (*1988, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. Syms obtained anMFA from Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2017) and a BFA fromthe School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Selected solo exhibitions includeMuseum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 2022),Fridericianum, Kassel (2021), Secession, Vienna (2019) and Museum of Modern Art,New York (2017). Group exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen(2022), MUDAM, Luxembourg (2021), MMK - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt(2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019) and Whitney Museum of American Art,New York (2018). Syms’ work has been recognized through multiple awards, includingHerb Alpert Award (2022), Creative Capital Award (2021), United States ArtistsFellowship and Future Fields Art Prize (both 2020). Syms is a 2023 GuggenheimFellow.

Syms has written and directed three feature films, The Mundane AfrofuturistManifesto, Incense Sweaters & Ice and The African Desperate (Mubi), which was theclosing night film of New Directors/New Films 2022 and nominated for anIndependent Spirit Award in 2023.

She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Double Penetration, a monthly radioshow on NTS. She also runs Dominica Publishing.