Installation view of Threat Model and Relax Your Jaw, on view in Martine Syms: Grio College.⁠ ⁠ Threat Model takes its form from a process used to map areas of potential vulnerabilities in computer software systems. Here, Syms connects a personified threat model—in a graphical version—to the growth of insecurities and vulnerabilities around internet and social media use: doxxing, privacy policies, content protection. The large-scale diagram, which also resembles a magazine quiz or flowchart, visualizes Syms’s personal weaknesses, neuroses, and negative thoughts around her own image, humorously identifiable to those familiar with the idiomatic textspeak surrounding friendship, body issues, gender and racial biases, money, dating apps and hooking up. ⁠ ⁠ Relax Your Jaw is presented as a floor piece, with the image proportions calling to mind the aspect ratio of an iPhone. The images themselves do not readily conform to any single or explicit narrative, but resemble a scattering of random photographs. Still, as in Threat Model, there is a pattern or order in place, channeling the ceaseless movements of social media feeds and scrolling, a motion at once full of direction, but somehow leading nowhere in particular. In this collapsing of psychological space and digital space, the experience of the works becomes a physical immersion into Syms’s interiority, the specific yet mundane images a gesture toward relatability. ⁠- Bonnie Chau⁠ ⁠ Martine Syms: Grio College is on view through November 27th. To learn more, please visit the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Also on view - Dara Birnbaum: Reaction and Black Melancholia⁠ ⁠ Museum Hours:⁠ Wednesday - Mon, 12pm-6pm⁠ ⁠ Photo: Olympia Shannon⁠ ⁠ #martinesyms #ccsbard #hesselmuseumofart