SHE MAD: Laughing Gas

2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Martine Syms

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1988
gender: female
nationality: American
home town: Los Angeles, California

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.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Conceptual Art, » Gender, » Race, » American  
» see more

After the Archive Collections Room
© » KADIST

Andrew Grassie

2009

In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...

BC/AD
© » KADIST

Ian Breakwell

2008

“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...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

After the Archive Collections Room
© » KADIST

Andrew Grassie

2009

In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...

BC/AD
© » KADIST

Ian Breakwell

2008

“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...

Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

1986

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...

I Want You
© » KADIST

Tony Labat

2008

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...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

How an Art Foundation Made the Difficult Decision to Sell Its Collection - via Artsy
© » LARRY'S LIST

Before it decided to sell the majority of its collection, California’s di Rosa Foundation explored the exact alternative critics of its decision have suggested....

Diana Al-Hadid’s Monumental, Spiky Bronzes Examine Feminine Strength and Fragility
© » ARTSY

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...

Juergen Teller “I need to live”
© » ARTPRESS

Juergen Teller "I need to live" - artpress 2 janvier 2024 In AP Web , arts visuels Juergen Teller “I need to live” Par Marc Donnadieu...

Qalqalah #3 and reading by Rasha Salti
© » KADIST

For the launch of the new issue of Qalqalah, Rasha Salti will share her new text Be Still My Beating Heart, part 4 which questions, through her curatorial practice between Beirut and Berlin, the exhibition of war images, pursuing her writing research, “ a fugue in fictional art history “...

Related works from the » 2010's created around » Los Angeles, California  
» see more

Silencer #16 & #17
© » KADIST

Will Rogan

2010

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...

Serengeti Green
© » KADIST

Phillip Maisel

2015

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...

There are veins in these lands, I
© » KADIST

Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

Eraser
© » KADIST

Will Rogan

2014

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Receding Triangular Square
© » KADIST

Virlani Hallberg

2012

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...

Martine Syms, in conversation with Myriam Ben Salah
© » KADIST

In residency at KADIST Paris in June 2018, American artist Martine Syms introduces her ongoing project Lessons and discusses blackness, psychoanalysis and 80’s sitcoms with curator Myriam Ben Salah (chief editor of KALEIDOSCOPE magazine)...

The Feminist School of Painting: Still Life and Genre Painting with Marcela Pardo Ariza
© » KADIST

Still Life and Genre Painting with Marcela Pardo Ariza October 27, 1–3pm Still life paintings depict inanimate subjects like food, flowers, vases, fabrics, and animals, which were often chosen to convey certain religious or symbolic meaning...

The Crime of Art
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2017

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)...