Martine Syms: Grio College on view at the Hessel Museum of Art through November 27, 2022 The practice of #MartineSyms (Bard College, MFA’17) is distinguished by its boundlessness: her subjects move across media—print and web publishing, moving image, photography, installation, AI, software—dissolving the lines between these forms. One of the most insightful and important artists to show how digital media shapes our culture, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. “Syms is a prolific artist who is rigorous in both media and method: she is an astute listener to language and a deep researcher of visual patterns and representation,” said Cornell. “Grio College highlights the range of her production since 2017, and, on the heels of her first feature film, the exhibition also seeks to emphasize her versatile approach to photography, highlighting the many scales and methods through which she approaches image-making.” Grio College features major new and recent work by Syms in video, photography, installation, drawing, and written form. A focal point of the exhibition is her now iconic installation on gesture and femininity Borrowed Lady (2016), which was recently acquired by the Marieluise Hessel Collection. The multifaceted work takes a cue from writer Samuel R. Delany’s explorations of how feminine characters are constructed through the compositing of ideal physiological and psychological features, and draws from Syms’ own archives to speculate on the influences on her actor’s gestures. Other installations include Ugly Plymouths (2020), an immersive one-act play across three screens each representing a different character, and DED (2021), a gripping digital animation in which an avatar of the artist—wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the phrase: “To hell with my suffering”—moves through a digital netherworld, repeatedly committing suicide and then resuscitating to a soundtrack of her own music and voice. Martine Syms: Grio College is curated by #LaurenCornell, Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard.