Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas. Syms’s 4-channel installation follows the central character (an aspiring artist also named Martine Syms) on a journey home from the dentist after receiving “laughing gas.” Mixing multiple points of view, clips borrowed from TV, as well as layers of comedy, fiction, reality, and critique, Syms’ work also delves into issues of race, culture, and representation. For Los Angeles-based Martine Syms, popular culture, television, and the cultural histories woven through both are starting points for her interdisciplinary art practice.
Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles) uses video and performance to examine representations of blackness. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, ICA London, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. She has lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Syms’ recently presented exhibitions include Projects 106: Martine Syms, Museum of Modern Art; Borrowed Lady, Simon Fraser University Galleries, Vancouver; Fact and Trouble, ICA London; COM PORT MENT, Karma International, Los Angeles; Vertical Elevated Oblique, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York. From 2007-2011 she was the co-director of the Chicago artist run project space Golden Age, and she currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. She is the author of Implications and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film (2011). Her first US solo museum exhibition Projects 106: Martine Syms, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May of 2017. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
Diana Al-Hadid’s Monumental, Spiky Bronzes Examine Feminine Strength and Fragility | Artsy Skip to Main Content Advertisement Art Diana Al-Hadid’s Monumental, Spiky Bronzes Examine Feminine Strength and Fragility Rawaa Talass Nov 16, 2023 5:13PM Diana Al-Hadid The Bride in the Large Glass , 2023 Kasmin Price on request Portrait of Diana Al-Hadid by Diego Flores...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
In collaboration with psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Leon Tan, Receding Triangular Square explores traditional Chinese and Taiwanese modalities of psychological healing as alternatives to dominant Western psychiatric and therapeutic practices...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...