Exhibits

Martine Syms

January 10 – March 28, 2015

 
Working across mediums to collapse cultural conventions, Martine Syms’ interdisciplinary practice allows for “code-switching” as she shifts between the roles of artist, graphic designer, writer, lecturer, filmmaker, publisher, and entrepreneur. Her new video series, Lessons, uses television as a site and resource for the performance of identity. The series began with Syms making commercials for each of the five lessons on black radical traditions outlined in Kevin Young’s book The Grey Album. After creating commercials for each of the five lessons, using found footage, personal archives, and original footage, she continued the series, exploring blackness as topic, reference, audience, and marker in visual culture. Adopting mechanisms used in the production of images such as c-stands and autopoles, Syms moves them from framing apparatuses to within the frame of an image, as if zooming out on the various structures that inform how we see and what we believe.
 
White Flag Library is an ancillary exhibition program of White Flag Projects.
 
Organized by Marie Heilich
 
publication
  • SYMS2
    • Girlfriends (2000-2008), 2015
      Vinyl banner on c-stand
      Banner 24 x 60 inches, c-stand
      27.5 x 53 x 126.5 inches
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  • 4
    • Still from Lesson I-XXX, 2014-2015
      HD video
      Series of 24 videos, 12 minutes
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  • 2
    • Still from Lesson I-XXX, 2014-2015
      HD video
      Series of 24 videos, 12 minutes
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  • 3b
    • Still from Lesson I-XXX, 2014-2015
      HD video
      Series of 24 videos, 12 minutes
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  • 1
    • Still from Lesson I-XXX, 2014-2015
      HD video
      Series of 24 videos, 12 minutes
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