https://yumeinoue.com yume inoue murphy Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:34:53 +0000 https://yumeinoue.com en https://yumeinoue.com/HOME Wed, 02 Sep 2020 19:54:35 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/HOME select pieces and recent projects https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Glimmer-in-the-Grit-2023 Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:34:53 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Glimmer-in-the-Grit-2023 Glimmer in the Grit By Yume Murphy Sitting with Ja'Tovia Gary's everyday sublime. <img width="2048" height="905" width_o="2048" height_o="905" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/378c5485f5f30ce506d89e3f1d8ed82f3aad40c2a50f5135deda0c98857c9ef9/Installation-view-of-Concentrations-64-JaTovia-Gary-I-KNOW-IT-WAS-THE-BLOOD_Courtesy-Dallas-Museum-of-Art_03-2048x905.jpg" data-mid="236882017" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/378c5485f5f30ce506d89e3f1d8ed82f3aad40c2a50f5135deda0c98857c9ef9/Installation-view-of-Concentrations-64-JaTovia-Gary-I-KNOW-IT-WAS-THE-BLOOD_Courtesy-Dallas-Museum-of-Art_03-2048x905.jpg" /> This profile was originally published in Issue 006 of Seen, a journal of film and visual culture focused on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Seen retains all rights and licenses for this article. The orginal article can be read, and the issue purchased,&nbsp;here. Below is a repoduction. They say everything is bigger in Texas, but they don’t tell you how time seems to move quite differently in the Lone Star State. Home to a community of artists that lays claim to a radically Black avant-garde tradition—such as jazz pianist Robert Glasper and singer Erykah Badu—Texas has some afrofuturist conventions of its very own making. In her latest series of works, Ja’Tovia Gary cements their place in this legacy. A Dallas native, the filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist, who uses they and she pronouns interchangeably, has always called home to the South, and it calls home to her. The descendant of generations of matriarchs hailing from both Texas and Arkansas, Gary returned to the former in 2019 after nearly two decades in New York City, a journey they would describe as “spirit-led.” African spirituality, Black Southern culture, her upbringing in the Pentecostal church—its preachers, bellowing gospel singers, ritual, and awareness of a transcendent “invisible world”—and her family remain formative source materials for Gary’s ongoing cinematic investigations. These investigations—into Black femme experience, interiority, and inheritance, alongside both personal and public archives—demonstrate Gary’s ongoing autobiographical instinct. When we meet at the Dallas Museum, she tells me that she’s been visiting since she was a child. “I remember seeing my first Frida Kahlo here.” In this way, her presentation at the museum is a long time in the making. It’s a homecoming. <img width="800" height="1200" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Installation-view-of-Precious-Memories_02.jpg" style="width: 800px; height: 1200px;">Installation view of Precious Memories, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2020, photo by Steven Probert, courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck after being originated by curator Vivian Crockett, the solo exhibition of the artist’s recent works, Concentrations 64: Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD, is presented in the museum’s Hoffman Galleries as both memoir and homage to Gary’s matrilineal legacies. Across two rooms, the five multimedia works on view—neon and mobile sculptures, paintings, and films that pull from Gary’s family archives—sing a resonant hymn, emitting a haloed pink aura punctuated by flashes of red across screens. The title, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD, references a gospel song made popular in Black churches. While the lyrics proclaim a devotion to Jesus Christ and his ultimate sacrifice, the works on view conjure a certain reverence for Gary’s family members, their shared knowledge, and generational wounds. For Gary, who calls to her orishas and egun throughout the works, the exhibition title is a truth. The blood is divine. Upon entering the first gallery, Precious Memories (2020), a sculptural installation composed of a tower of monitors set in a staged living room environment, takes center stage. The tower stacks three off-balanced monitors atop one another, with natural materials—cotton, moss, and helichrysum flower—wedged between each TV. The topmost one plays archival footage of a soundie, a short musical film format popularized in the 1940s that provided Black performers a unique opportunity to be featured in films (and for archivists, a rare form of documentation of African American performers). In this instance, Louis Armstrong performs a dramatized rendition of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”—a jazz song whose original lyrics reminisce on an idyllic South while giving in to racist stereotypes—alongside a cast that includes a mammy figure and a Sambo figure dancing with an oversized chicken leg. Here, Gary has inscribed red etched, painted, and scratched illustrations that resemble blood and splatter onto the surface of the film, emphasizing the violence present in the soundie’s representation of Black figures. Beneath, Gary memorializes the death of her stepfather with footage of his funeral service, a morose film that documents their family in their church and as they walk back to their cars. At the bottom, Gary abstracts a porn film into a pixelated symphony of patterns, movement, and light, any sex acts illegible to an untrained eye. The three-channel installation is spotlighted by two stage lamps. Nearby, a portrait of Gary’s mother sits on a table beside a La-Z-Boy recliner, reminiscent of the one Gary grew up with in her childhood home, [they tell me], facing the leaning tower of screens. The installation’s mise-en-scène recalls a sort of tired homeyness; a familiar sense of comfort and nostalgia arises with the vacancy of the worn chair. Placing the viewer in a surrealist construction of Gary’s childhood home, and by extension their childhood self, Precious Memories meditates on how trauma—generational, institutional, and gender-based—shapes our memory and ability to cope. Notably, the three video loops emerge from three distinct generations through which Black Americans found representation in film, for better or worse: the early twentieth century, the dawn of the new millennium, and most recently, the digital age. This work also draws on three distinct filmic genres: the musical film, home movie, and internet pornography. Gary, who in her work imposes an oppositional gaze, affirms Black feminist spectatorship with this juxtaposition.1 She offers a sort of visual pleasure in deconstructing the violence of the original texts by connecting historical and personal wounds. Her interventions, the illustrated and experimental inscription into the surface of the films, create visual metaphors that acknowledge the harm enacted in racist and fetishistic representations. The installation offers a rare instance of an immersive and affective visualization of Black femme experiences and, most importantly, Gary’s interiority. Precious Memories invites you to take a seat in her place. <img width="1200" height="800" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Installation-view-of-Precious-Memories_01.jpg" style="width: 938.088196px; height: 625.392131px;">Installation view of Precious Memories, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2020, photo by Steven Probert, courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. In conversation with Precious Memories is Citational Ethics (Saidiya Hartman, 2017)(2020), the first in Gary’s ongoing Citational Ethics series. Lovingly, the neon sculpture reads, “Care is the antidote to violence,” a quote from theorist and writer Saidiya Hartman, from her conversation with Black feminist writer Christina Sharpe.2 The quote responds to Sharpe’s critical text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, framing “wake work,” which can be understood as the labor of affirming one’s identity and independence in the wake of slavery, as a form of care.3&nbsp;The neon sculpture shapes two warm hands as an offering, with “care” written in sweet script and “violence” in all caps. The sculpture is a glowing prayer and reminder that a touch of tenderness can go far in working with historical wounds in the archive, and even Black grief. In the adjoining room, additional footage from Gary’s family archive comes to the fore. Her great-aunt Mary Lee Dunn, more affectionately known as Aunt Mae, captured an incredible collection of films depicting Gary’s family on Super 8mm film throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Largely intact, the footage on view is excerpted from Gary’s forthcoming feature film, a memoir currently titled Evidence of Things Not Seen, which gathers family interviews, animation, and archival footage. Gary has continued to work on this project for over a decade. <img width="857" height="1200" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Installation-view-of-Citational-Ethics_01.jpg" style="width: 857px; height: 1200px;">Installation view of Citational Ethics, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2020, photo by Steven Probert, courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Central in this room is In my mother’s house there are many, many . . . (2023), a newly commissioned work that reimagines the armillary sphere, an ancient wayfinding tool used to navigate the sea and cosmos. At almost 12 feet tall, the revolving sculpture possesses a monumental gravity, pulling you in to look at its structure, the imagery projected onto it, and its movement. The sphere is made of thousands of cotton balls, with stems attached, onto which Gary projects a montage of matriarchal figures, including herself, her mother, grandmother, and aunties: all Southerners who have lived and continue to exist in the wake of slavery. Gary tells me that many of these women have worked on cotton plantations, while reminding me that cotton remains a salve to her and her ancestors. The cotton plant has many medicinal properties, after all. In my mother’s house there are many, many . . . gives thanks to Gary’s matriarchal lineage and legacy, and lovingly restores Gary’s Aunt Mae’s extraordinary footage. Orbiting the sphere are more works—a multichannel film and multimedia portraits. Flanking the sculpture on each side are projections of Mitochondrial Montage&nbsp;(2023), an autobiographical film. The nine-minute film fills the rooms with the sound of Black worship. The film collages clips from Gary’s time in Ghana, footage excerpted from Evidence of Things Not Seen—including portraits of the artist and family members—and a video of a gospel choir singing. There isn’t really a linear progression or narrative offered by the film, yet movement—Gary’s dancing, heart-shaped illustrations, and rhythmic layering of audio-visual material—signals a kind of biological worldbuilding. We are privileged with an excerpt of the artist’s memory, inherited. The title of the work references a part of the organic cell structure: the mitochondria, small structures that are responsible for producing energy for the cell to function. It’s also a metaphor for the celluloid film used in the Super 8 films. Just as blood is shared in her family, Aunt Mae’s celluloid lives on in Gary’s works. Cast aside painted, glowing portraits of Gary’s mother and father, Mitochondrial Montage conjures the spirits that make Gary. <img width="1920" height="1064" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Installation-view-of-Concentrations-64-JaTovia-Gary-I-KNOW-IT-WAS-THE-BLOOD_Courtesy-Dallas-Museum-of-Art_10-1920x1064.jpg" style="width: 938.088196px; height: 519.857209px;">Concentrations 64: Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, 2023, courtesy Dallas Museum of Art. Throughout the exhibition, the autobiographical is mirrored by the matrilineal. Across both rooms, the work takes focus on maternal figures in Gary’s life: her mother, grandmother, great-aunt, and great-grandmother. Fittingly, the exhibition flyer features an image of Gary’s mother, a still drawn from Evidence of Things Not Seen. Hand cocked on hip, she casts a knowing look—“bombastic side eye,” so to speak. Here, Gary’s focus on matrilineal relationships recalls the work of sculptor and filmmaker Camille Billops, whose documentary films Finding Christa (1991) and Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) focus on relationships between women in her family (including her estranged daughter) and use matrilineal histories as grounds for the unleashing of generational trauma. In Billops’s works, matrilineal legacies foreshadow a fatalistic view of her family, doomed to live in the shadows of domestic violence, trauma, and addiction. In their work, Gary offers a distinctly sentimental subjectivity that expresses a future-facing Black femme interiority—a caring gaze, a hand, an embrace, a kiss blown to the women that came before her. Here, the matrilineal—both motherhood and daughterhood—presides as a guarding entity in Gary’s reflection of her life. Still, Gary’s orientation to the past is not unique. They are in conversation with a generation of Black thinkers and creatives who are interested in expanding the genre of afrofuturism to encapsulate interstellar, restorative futures. In addition to Sharpe and Hartman, Gary names filmmakers Cauleen Smith and Arthur Jafa as figures whose works have deeply influenced her practice. In conversation with these thinkers, writers, and artists, Gary creates an equally auto-ethnographic and experimental cinema, conjuring the dead and the living in attunement with one another. The first time I encountered Gary’s work was just this year. Tucked into the chapel-like structure that is Paula Cooper’s Chelsea gallery in Manhattan, You Smell Like Outside—a Black Southern phrase most often heard from a mother or grandmother upon retiring home from a long day outside—pronounced a monumental sense of comfort in one’s own skin. The solo exhibition premiered Quiet as It’s Kept (2021), Gary’s cinematic response to Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, which had its (cinematic) world premiere at BlackStar Film Festival and is on view at MoMA this fall. It became apparent to me then that Gary is interested in the sublime that exists in the everyday—the glimmer in the grit. There, and in Dallas, their colloquial artistic impulse becomes undeniable. For as much as Gary’s work has utilized formal conventions learned from their documentary training, they work within a Black avant-garde tradition with an equally critical and reflexive perspective on what it means to be a Black woman today—to feel rooted, to feel safe. In both exhibitions, Gary takes turns of phrase and conjures both interior and relatable Black experiences. Her titling alone is relational—between the words “you” and “I” exists a dialogue negotiating ancestral knowledge, generational trauma, and healing for Gary. A declarative title in all caps, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD, calls out to her kinfolk, their skinfolk, and our shared lamentation of what we most negotiate in the wake of our ancestors’ oppression, wounds, love, and care. The works confront viewers with the knowledge that some things are inescapable—the weight of motherhood, the fact of living in the wake, the violence of the camera, generational trauma. Not destiny, not necessarily faith, but moments where you are cornered by your very own ghosts, the very facts of your making. Sometimes this necessitates going back to your roots, as Gary returned to Texas. More often, a deep intimacy with the past—with the dead—serves as a reminder of who made you. Upon returning, there is a lesson to be learned: the blood is divine. Here I am reminded by Gary of this essential truth. I know it was the blood. Footnotes: Oppositional gaze, as defined by activist bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, is a mode of looking utilized by black female spectators to critically engage cinematic works, neither identifying with “the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white-womanhood as lack.” bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992). In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe, Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2017, https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/in-the-wake-a-salon-in-honor-of-christina-sharpe/. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) https://yumeinoue.com/PHOTO-Snapshots-2022 Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:07:00 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/PHOTO-Snapshots-2022 PHOTO <img width="2376" height="3583" width_o="2376" height_o="3583" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4a21e6b9256cb451e292a626392c995bedc964b57cb6e637ee28dc4ab6dbfa6/48190026.JPG" data-mid="236881421" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e4a21e6b9256cb451e292a626392c995bedc964b57cb6e637ee28dc4ab6dbfa6/48190026.JPG" /> <img width="2376" height="3583" width_o="2376" height_o="3583" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d65509ecedd3a19927c265e2f084a8cff166f6ad1e5d34196ddc8654be0d77d0/48190017.JPG" data-mid="236881422" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d65509ecedd3a19927c265e2f084a8cff166f6ad1e5d34196ddc8654be0d77d0/48190017.JPG" /> <img width="2376" height="3583" width_o="2376" height_o="3583" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ddbb0bb2286bb9f1ca3849ab81e1ca86b66e07a082683aeba9fc68640cb59acb/00014_21A.jpg" data-mid="236881539" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ddbb0bb2286bb9f1ca3849ab81e1ca86b66e07a082683aeba9fc68640cb59acb/00014_21A.jpg" /> <img width="1600" height="2397" width_o="1600" height_o="2397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8c79dacf4bc1bd580f57e93f631d55458c41c34696bdc416ba0044f3a81fad65/00017_18A.jpg" data-mid="236881540" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8c79dacf4bc1bd580f57e93f631d55458c41c34696bdc416ba0044f3a81fad65/00017_18A.jpg" /> https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-With-Her-Latest-Film-Martine-Syms-Is-Pursuing-Pleasure-2022 Thu, 04 May 2023 01:34:03 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-With-Her-Latest-Film-Martine-Syms-Is-Pursuing-Pleasure-2022 With Her Latest Film, Martine Syms Is Pursuing Pleasure By Yume Murphy <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac7be8cbd6740273826737292bf0d3d832d5f67b0ab584fe62e1589745668c1f/MartineSyms.jpeg" data-mid="177599689" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ac7be8cbd6740273826737292bf0d3d832d5f67b0ab584fe62e1589745668c1f/MartineSyms.jpeg" /> This profile was originally published in Issue 004 of Seen, a journal of film and visual culture focused on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Seen retains all rights and licenses for this article. The orginal article can be read, and the issue purchased,&nbsp;here. Below is a repoduction: The role of the artist has never been so fucked. In the world of today’s clout-erati, a dedicated cult of personality is seemingly essential for widespread celebration as an artist. Not intellect, ambition, or talent, but an obsession with oneself—a god complex even—has propelled many of today’s most talked-about figures in art and entertainment into mainstream virality. In an image-saturated and hyper-capitalist market, egomania has come to act as a marker of true genius. To be a creator is to be a god—Kanye’s self-proclaimed branding as Yeezus, a sort of equally dystopic and ultra-modern Black messiah, comes to mind. Still, there are few visionaries who possess a larger-than-life sense of self that feels well earned. Martine Syms is such a figure. Syms brandishes herself as a “conceptual entrepreneur,”1 and her voice has always been, in her words, “clear as a fucking whistle.” Syms is an artist, a filmmaker, a poet, a technologist, a theorist, a trickster, a chaos connoisseur—and the list goes on. But most notably, she is someone who is deeply intuitive. As she works across a wide range of time-based media, Syms’s voice is easily the most distinguishable aspect of her impressive volume of work and an impressive practice she maintains. For over a decade now, her signature blend of deadpan Black comedy and keen social critique has pulled from a rigorous theoretical lexicon. It has often taken form as cheeky, if not incisive, moving image work and photography. Her broader conceptual approaches to image making, meditative multimedia installations, sculpture, and discursive print and web publishing are all interested in how Black femme subjectivity, surveillance, and performance exist in time. <img width="1472" height="1104" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20220430_IMG_9918-1472x1104.jpg" style="width: 746.28125px; height: 559.710938px;">Martine Syms, photographed by Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr. Even more, she’s learned to trust this inner voice. In our emailed exchanges, she shares that she has “built [her] life around letting it resonate.” She tells me of how in recent years she’s taken vocal lessons to help her use her voice as a tool for healing and power. “I’m not afraid of what comes out of me,” she continues. “I can howl. I can croak. I can scream. I can sing a beautiful melody. It’s all me.” Now in her early thirties, the Los Angeles native is more playful than ever. Most recently, HelLA World, Syms’s Prada Mode Los Angeles installation at Genghis Cohen, exemplified this blend of jest, mischief, and indulgence.2 The immersive and interactive installation presented a pop-up bar, cafe, and display shelves of various art publications, likely courtesy of Syms’s publishing imprint, Dominica. Live video feeds and text displays reflected on the surveillant and social forces at play in a party.3&nbsp;Syms’s 2021 collaboration with French fashion label Études also bears a striking resemblance to her HelLA World presentation—both projects luxuriate in the color purple, for which Syms has an affinity.4&nbsp;“My specialties are modern comedy, the color purple, and strategic swearing,” she explains. There is a level of taste, pleasure, and play that is deeply embedded in her recent work. This is never more pronounced than in The African Desperate (2022), Syms’s debut feature, which made its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has since closed out the fifty-first edition of MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films.5 With a drug-laced swagger and a predilection for absurdity, Syms presents us with The African Desperate, a cautionary tale of a Black woman artist escaping the ivory tower. The film chronicles the fictional Aquarius sculptor Palace Bryant—played by Syms’s longtime collaborator and friend Diamond Stingily—and her final frenetic hours as an MFA student at an unnamed school located in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley. What ensues is a surreal series of unfortunate events, softened only by a seasoning of earthly delights. <img width="1472" height="828" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/TheAfricanDesperate_2022_CourtesyofDominicaInc_7-1472x828.jpg" style="width: 746.28125px; height: 419.783203px;">Erin Leland and Diamond Stingily in The African Desperate (2022), dir. Martine Syms, courtesy of Dominica Inc. Scored by Syms (under her production moniker Aunt Sister) alongside composers Colin Self and Ben Babbitt, the film opens with a scene that rises to a sonic barrage of glitchy and brash rings and melodious sighs—the aural backdrop for Palace’s final critique with her all-white professors. Visibly fed up and checked out, Palace barely entertains their out-of-touch and micro-aggressive missives regarding her work before toasting to her graduation. “What if there were actually no people in the work?” Palace’s professor, Rose (played by Syms’s gallerist Bridget Donahue), implores. “You mean, um, you mean Black people,” Palace responds, more than she asks. At a point, a variation of the Confused Black Girl meme flashes onto the screen.6 &nbsp;Eventually, the film’s title card&nbsp;appears, its font reminiscent of gaming arcades, while heavy bass resounds the incredulity of the preceding scene. This opening sets the stage for the kind of mental slavery Palace is tasked with resisting, and what Syms describes as “the artist’s relationship to reality, to truth, to rendering experience.”7 In the film, particularly enduring scenarios are met with indulgences: a trip to the lake accompanied with fresh fruit and locally brewed kombucha, a drop or three of psilocybin, alcohol, hella weed, an unplanned appearance at Palace’s graduation party, ketamine, juvenile make-outs, and later, kinky play. Throughout, references to influential artistic and literary texts offer Palace defense from racist and diminutive slights, if not offering a laugh. Still, for every mention of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons, and the work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, to name a few, Palace finds ultimate solace in her desire, often at her own detriment. After all, The African Desperate was made for people who like good shit, for lovers of the cinema, for quiet sexy types, for real heads, for people who like to have fun, and for people with impeccable taste,” Syms tells me. Still, Palace’s interest in indie fuckboy Evan, played by Aaron Bobrow, comes at the cost of not only her plans to leave the ivory tower on a timely schedule but also her pride. Her desire to be liked and accepted among her peers jeopardizes her immediate wellbeing as she partakes in a seemingly impossible cocktail of drugs. How is a girl to have fun when all her vices seek her compromise? <img width="1472" height="828" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/TheAfricanDesperate_2022_CourtesyofDominicaInc_4-1472x828.jpg" style="width: 746.28125px; height: 419.783203px;">Diamond Stingily in The African Desperate (2022), dir. Martine Syms, courtesy of Dominica Inc. To survive, Palace must contain multitudes. And does Diamond Stingily provide for a nuanced performance . .&nbsp;. Lush, sexy, and chaotic, Stingily’s take on Palace is equally emphatic and endearing. The artist’s portrayal of her character is rather freaky and bold, introverted yet attention-seeking, all the while being impossibly cool. She prances across the quaint Hudson Valley town fitted in a floral muumuu, Fanta Orange hair, and black Air Force Ones, replete with her signature wine-colored lip. From scene to scene, we’re given a deep awareness of Palace’s own inner workings as Stingily successfully imbues each scene with&nbsp;differing&nbsp;levels of comfort, tone, and energy. With her friend Hannah (Erin Leland), Palace is defiant and chilled, while with a group of peers, the MFA grad is rather guarded. Palace is showing in the Venice Biennale but at some point reveals she doesn’t even know if she plans to attend. Her performance is rhizomatic. Presumptively, Syms, who completed her own MFA at Bard College, where The African Desperate was filmed, shares a lot in common with the fictional Palace. For one, they’re both artists who recognize the value of a good lie. But Syms maintains that the film isn’t necessarily an autobiography: “The Palace character is based on Diamond as much as me. My co-writer Rocket Caleshu also went to an MFA program, and we’ve used anecdotes from our friends too.” Instead, she reveals that the role was practically written for Stingily. “I asked her if she’d star in a movie if I wrote one for her,” Syms says. This level of collaboration underscores how this story came to be. Syms very carefully assembled her dream team, which includes past collaborators Vic Brooks, cinematographer Daisy Zhou, and longtime friends Lana Kim and Jett Steiger to produce the film. “It’s a continuation of all of the work I’ve been doing over the past decade. It poured out of me because I had to talk my shit,” she says. “I had a story to tell. I knew how to tell it.” <img width="1472" height="1472" src="https://wp.blackstarfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20220430_IMG_0561-1472x1472.jpg" style="width: 746.28125px; height: 746.28125px;">Martine Syms, photographed by Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr. The African Desperate is about the role and creation of an artist as much as it’s a story about the disembodiment that comes with being regarded as such. Palace is an enviable icon and, for that exact reason, a very lonely one. Repeatedly surrounded by a harem of friends who act more like fans, Palace ends up alone and unsupported. Unsurprisingly, Syms’s career has similarly amassed a cult following of many Black and femme and queer admirers as she’s emerged at a unique meeting place of art, fashion, and new media circles. There is quite simply no format or genre Syms won’t dabble in. Her practice is boundless—and for that, so is Syms. Footnotes: 1. Syms coined the term “conceptual entrepreneur” to define her practice in 2007. She has since explained that the term, which describes how ideas are both central to and create value for artistic work, is in direct reference to Sol Lewitt’s essay “Notes on Conceptual Art” rather than the invoked startup economies. 2. &nbsp;Prada Mode is a traveling social club with a focus on contemporary culture. Syms’s HelLA World installation was featured in its seventh iteration. 3. For HelLa World, Syms invited guests to text bits of information (gossip) to appear on text displays. 4. The Études x Martine Syms collaboration consists of a capsule clothing collection and a short movie exploring reality and the virtual world. 5. Syms directed her first feature-length documentary, The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, in 2015 for KCET. 6. The Confused Black Girl meme has seen countless iterations circulate on the internet as an incredulous reaction image. The use of (Black) memes in popular culture is discussed as a site of mass digital appropriation and exploitation by Aria Dean in “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Real Life, July 25, 2016, https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/. 7. “Mental slavery” is a term coined and heavily discussed by prominent pan-Africanist, Black nationalist, and activist Marcus Garvey. https://yumeinoue.com/PHOTO-Snapshots-2021 Wed, 13 Apr 2022 18:53:44 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/PHOTO-Snapshots-2021 PHOTO <img width="2395" height="3583" width_o="2395" height_o="3583" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3c6043f09b6d0b51f95163778818a4ff42e3ee6288b85686b50d19c5cdb1e4ae/000510410001.jpg" data-mid="139574585" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3c6043f09b6d0b51f95163778818a4ff42e3ee6288b85686b50d19c5cdb1e4ae/000510410001.jpg" /> <img width="2395" height="3583" width_o="2395" height_o="3583" 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/> https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-unbecoming-online-2021 Sat, 15 May 2021 14:52:49 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-unbecoming-online-2021 Unbecoming OnlineBy Yume Murphy This essay was originally published by ATM Magazine on April 20, 2021. ATM retains all rights and licenses for this essay. The orginal article can be read here. Below is a repoduction: <img width="679" height="679" width_o="679" height_o="679" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/acf441e6114c341f4a7d1322de4a32f221b394748f874d11e852957a05a5c3e6/25713B78-BCA1-406E-B01E-7299232D5BF3.JPG" data-mid="139552463" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/679/i/acf441e6114c341f4a7d1322de4a32f221b394748f874d11e852957a05a5c3e6/25713B78-BCA1-406E-B01E-7299232D5BF3.JPG" /> <img width="1682" height="970" width_o="1682" height_o="970" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b69c92a84238ed3ac4f4e44e8224444de48a0763641398710ab69e9dfef3d88/Screen-Shot-2021-03-18-at-05.09.21.png" data-mid="139575317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b69c92a84238ed3ac4f4e44e8224444de48a0763641398710ab69e9dfef3d88/Screen-Shot-2021-03-18-at-05.09.21.png" /> My earliest memories of being online took place on MyScene.com. Created by Mattel as a skinnier and trendier alternative to the company's Barbie dolls, and intended to compete with the popularity of Bratz, My Scene dolls represented everything en vogue about the early 2000s to my then eight-year-old self. To be waif-like, popular, and doused in makeup was the preteen dream. On the internet, the My Scene website hosted a number of games that embodied such aspirations–you could spend hours making over your dream bedroom, your makeup, your hair, if not shopping and designing clothes for the My Scene characters. So, like many prepubescent children with a handful of dolls, internet connection, and a proclivity for aesthetic curation, I went online to play house. Eager to grow up, and quickly developing an awareness of my body as something imbued with political meaning, I was attracted to the possibility that I could be embodied by something other than the softness of my own flesh, which was increasingly resembling the Michelin Man’s. Among my favorite games on the My Scene website were Barbie MakeOver Studio™ and Shopping Spree™; both of these allowed their intended users to emulate the fashionable and flirty lives of their characters through virtually immersive stand-ins for what could now be described as a “get ready with me” vlog. I imagined what a white, blonde, and skinny life could look like, dressing my avatarial skin up in the sluttiest of miniskirts for a Mall Maniac™ themed Shopping Spree™, or executing a cosmetic transformation on MakeOver Studio™ that only allowed me to further enhance Eurocentric facial features. (I could make my characters’ eyes more blue, if not an unnatural shade of violet.) Though I was eight years old, within a day’s time I could enjoy a complete glam squad experience, before going on a date with whichever boyfriend my My Scene character was paired with, heading off into the proverbial sunset. The effervescent beauty and ease these virtual experiences signaled felt like a tall glass of water, a refreshing allowance for a form of self expression that no IRL game or play-acting fulfilled. At this time in my life, I went online to escape, not what’s become colloquially understood as “real life,” but my actual physical body; the internet could provide a second skin. Before I could quite grasp the contours of my own discontent with the real body I inhabited, I knew there was much to be gained, or rather explored, through immaterial embodiment. While I was a brown, chubby, and ostensibly nerdy child, the growing expanse of my desires, my queries, and queerness surpassed the limits of who I was permitted to be based on the seemingly immutable physical body I inhabited. So I stretched myself thin, bending and distorting selves that felt immovable without the world wide web, illegible to anyone but myself. In hindsight, it was maybe the first time I felt like I could experiment with an identity that was not only permitted, but desired. On the internet, I finally arrived at a becoming, even if at the cost of unbecoming myself. &nbsp; legible leg·i·ble | ˈle-jə-bəl (adjective): clear enough to be read or deciphered; capable of being discovered or understood Equally aspirational and faulty, legibility has come to operate along the belief that we can liquify our inner worlds into becoming perfectly clear, unclouded. Under this premise, legibility is focused on the logical, signaling a broader investment in Western universalism: the originally Christian belief that the unification of human knowledge—and the advancement of technology and linear "progress"—could eventually liberate humankind, leading to a more peaceful, rational world. In Poetics of Relation, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant recognizes this tendency to reduce and narrow the complexities inherent in identification and difference as a Western obsession with transparency. He explains: If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. By assuming identifications can be made transparent in order to accept each other, the labels we tend to cling to not only become totalized as monolithes, but also as ostensibly universal commodities–erasing cultural or geographic specificity in favor of assuming a sameness of circumstance that does not exist. Still, the obviousness of transparency is so alluring. It offers someone the semblance of knowing completely, not only the motivations of others, but the motivations of the self. Glissant resolves that, in defense of this totalizing tactic, he ought to recognize his own identity as opaque, as both lucid and impenetrable from the West’s attempts at reduction, because essentially “human behaviors are fractal in nature”: equally random and chaotic. We’re too nuanced, too messy and complicated, for labels and categories meant to blanket our differences under the guise of universalism, especially once we consider an individual’s locales, their cultures, their many contexts. Opacity gives us permission to consider new forms of relation, of intimacy amongst one another untainted by the Western gaze, while universal legibility ultimately projects an impossible fetishization of sameness. We are not the same. Amidst the racial turmoil of the US in the 1960s, Audre Lorde recalls frustration with how others were so ready to project expectations and fantasies onto her based on her identities. In a 1982 speech at Harvard University entitled “Learning From the 60s”, she explains how her intersecting identities led others to eclipse her often inherently defiant (queer) personhood in attempts to render her legible to their own understandings of race and gender: I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life, my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match somebody else’s norm. The compounding realities of being a “Black, dyke, feminist, poet, mother” rendered Lorde illegible to contemporary discourse, leaving her to create new language to define herself. She cautions that were it not for the self-identification of her own lived experience and intersecting identities, she would risk having her experience flattened and narrowed by others so that they would deem her more acceptable, but also erased. Becoming legible, acceptable even, is to limit the depth of who you are. It’s to manipulate yourself, especially if that self is considered part of the many-headed Other, into the fantasies of the oppressor. Today’s commodified internet has only made this fantasy more immersive, galvanizing algorithms and fostering networked social spaces that work to encode offline life into digital existence. Today, as digital embodiments and interactions become increasingly reflexive of the material realm, legibility has taken hold of how we represent ourselves online. As social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson describes, digital space is woven into the fabric of life away from the keyboard (AFK). Now primed by state and corporate surveillance of the internet, we take our physical skins online with us, molding our digital profiles and cyber behaviors to those that correspond with our AFK bodies in order to strive towards an almost universal legibility. The technological advancement of the internet and its digital media has also strived toward this kind of fixed universal legibility in representation. Over the course of more than a decade online, I’ve witnessed my smartphone learn to encode my face in the span of seconds, while personal branding has become a buzzy word for being consistently (and profitably) legible to a maximum number of people in online spaces. These developments have quickened and made more convenient how we translate who we are and what we do into the digital realm. But, though the cultural fixation on legible representation has pushed us towards realism, it has ultimately eclipsed the dimensionality of all that can not be captured by defining and sorting. Legibility attempts to enclose us within fixed categories through datafication. In the past decade or so, the internet has enabled the attention economy to reach new heights; an emporium of influencers and e-commerce shops have now overtaken our Instagram feeds; TikTok lures in users and content creators alike through algorithms that offer the promise of feeling seen through personalized feeds; and journalists are now becoming influencers to make a living wage. To exist in the modern age is to be seen and engaged with online, not as some avatar, but as your distilled self. Now more than ever, the billionaires who own the websites and apps that we visit daily track every click, every like, and even every scroll, commodifying our attention into quantifiable nuggets and shaping a growing market of content. Datafication, and by extension data mining, have become key to making these nuggets legible to corporations. Once the user’s presence is translated into a form of data, the user’s engagement is made exploitable. And the proliferation of this datafication has been swift and expansive. I can quite easily recall the first time I became aware of how exactly I, myself, was being datafied and sorted. In 2016, in light of the nearing US presidential election, my high school sociology teacher turned my classmates’ and my attention to how social media classifies our online existences by politics, age, and gender. He explained that, if we were to go into our Facebook settings, we would find a number of categorizing labels assigned to us. Unsurprisingly, there in my Ad Preferences the words “very liberal” sat next to “US politics.” More recently, this datafication has proven erroneous and incapable of rendering myself (and my body) as fully legible, even as it expands its reach into the realm of the physical. My iPhone’s facial recognition algorithm is invariably racist. Though I came across 2017 reports of the iPhone X’s failure to differentiate the Asian features of its users in China, where the majority of Apple iPhones are assembled, I naively did not expect to find evidence of this in my own handling of the smartphone when I purchased it in 2019. To this day, the Memoji feature will render my characteristically Asian eyes as sleepy, almost closed; to get my Memoji to look anywhere near “normal” I need to gaze into the lens of my phone with some sort of comedic expression, forcing my eyes to bulge. Memojis, in fact, do not “match your personality and mood.” Twitter has recently issued apologies for its racist image cropping algorithm. In September of 2020, a mass of users called attention to, and began collecting evidence to show, how Twitter’s image cropping algorithm consistently focused on white faces (coded as more normative) over Black faces. In my own experience, I’ve also noticed curious trends in how this image cropping algorithm focuses on breasts over the faces of femmes. On Twitter, non-white bodies are largely coded as deviant, and consequently masked by algorithmic violence. Again, the physical body is effectively erased, illegible to the platform which seeks to sort and define it. ImageNet Roulette, a digital art project developed by artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, was created to expose the violences encoded within the facial recognition technologies. Through the project, users could upload an image of themselves to be labeled as one of the 2,833 subcategories programmed into ImageNet’s AI. The labels ranged from terms like “stunner” to the more offensive “offender” and were often imbued with racial and gender biases, essentializing the universalist Western gaze onto the physical and digital skins of individuals. The project is a testament to how legibility seeks to fix our physical bodies, and by extension our entire beings. Instead of feeling seen or understood, making myself legible online has felt like a practice in survival, like a game of picking and choosing how I’d wish to tie up the expanse of my personhood into three neat loops. But where does that leave me, and my own desire for digital expressions that feel experimental, queer, and illegible? In an essay describing how astrology can help navigate neoliberalism, Tabitha Prado-Richardson describes writes that “what is able to be seen, measured, and understood within the frame of the West” is actively considered legible, “discrediting that which cannot be fully translated or captured.” For all of the parts of myself that feel discarded in light of the project of legibility, I find myself unequivocally exiled to an online existence that feels fugitive. What do you do when the self that is legible—that is able to be defined by platforms, discourse, and culture—is not who you understand yourself to be?I fucked around and I turned to a meme. —Tommy Cash, “3D COOL WORLD,” 2018 In Glitch Feminism, writer and curator Legacy Russell discusses how othered bodies are made invisible by their lack of pliability, by their refusal to be read by a normative mainstream that would then categorize them, and are ultimately “erased or misclassified within and outside of an algorithmic designation.” This is true for Black and brown bodies, and it is true for bodies that don't fit under normative “male” and “female” designations, or bodies that simply don’t subscribe to normative shapes and forms and abilities. Here, Russell finds radical potential in exclusion and rejection, affirming that “our unreadable bodies are a necessary disruption” in a system that conflates legibility and humanity. Through this framework, a glitched body is understood as an “opportunity to experiment and try on different selves” that “empowers seizing a more integrated public identity with radical potential.” For Russell (and for me), our bodies are revolutionary glitches that do not need to—and cannot possibly—completely signify who we are in order to have our humanity acknowledged. Legibility goes out the window. In this vein, many Black artists and creative thinkers understand themselves as both glitched in nature and multiplicitous in quality, transcending definitions based on the skin of the body. In an interview, artist Jacolby Satterwhite describes how his digital art practice allows for a form of multiplicitous self-actualization: Social media, technology, the internet, the way that our bodies exist virtually–it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity of the body. My body is multiplied several times in my videos not because I’m narcissistic, but it’s because I consider the videos to be similar to an essay. I feel like my body is a form of punctuation. They act as commas, exclamation points, question marks. Through the interview, it becomes clear that Satterwhite sees the physical Black body as one of many embodiments of a multiplicitous self; a queering of the self through time, space, and context. I think that the way many people with deviant identities, especially queer Black folks, navigate online space emulates this. In an essay on the Blackness of memes, artist, curator, and writer Aria Dean writes that, “for Blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.” In “We Real Cool” Lauren Jackson makes similar claims, describing how “the internet allows and requires us each to be many people at the same time,” in effect creating a representation of Blackness that is “multiplicitous” and “unbounded.” For the othered body, unboundedness and transcendence are inevitable in a system that can never grasp the depth, the opacity, of such unreadable embodiment. Ultimately, these more amorphous interpretations of a plural self comfort me, reminding me of my early days on the internet where joy and pleasure were easily found through experiments with playing multiple selves, many facets of who I ought to be. These days, my most amusing use of the internet is Twitter. The Twitter timeline, once chronological and free of algorithms that do the searching for you, has become increasingly curated–pushing trends and viral tweets that were supposed to be relevant to the top of my timeline, while tweets from favored mutuals disappeared into the abyss. The effect was immense once isolated by the pandemic. I felt like I needed to speak a certain way, be a special kind of self-deprecating funny, to reach the masses I had once shared physical space with. So, I created an alt. Sporting a memed image of Mariah Carey emblazoned with “I’M HIGH!!!!!!!!” below her face as its profile picture, my alt was created in the summer of 2020, once I began to consider the implications of job recruiters potentially finding my most errant thoughts online. Most of the tweets on this account are retweets of culturally specific memes related to New Jersey, pop culture, astrology, and my own thoughts–trivial complaints, hot takes, and pseudo-intellectual musings that I assume would not fit the “brand” of my more professional, and more public, account. Perspectives and dogmas introduced to me from my own time at a small liberal arts college color my commentary on content mostly originating from Black Twitter in a way that feels unpopular. I make light of the more tragic occurrences in my life, memeing the pain away. I complain about the fear that work will never end, that my life will spill into a never ending stream of 40-hour work weeks, despite my own ambitions. I muse about why all my favorite musical artists are freaky white men. I describe myself through images of other people, quote tweeting, “this is me [insert thing I do].” On my alt, I toy with a number of registers I decide to speak through, picking and choosing selves that seem to match who I wish to be at any given moment. I joke about feeling like a disembodied hottie. On this account, I’m too personal, too messy, too much–nothing here feels legible because I’m just being me. But, on this globalized and capitalizing web, it’s the most human outlet for expression I’ve been able to find for awhile. It’s the closest I’ve come to unbecoming everything I’ve constructed myself into. https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Black-Femme-Sovereign-of-WAP-and-the-Virtual-Realm-Shines-at Sat, 15 May 2021 13:51:17 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Black-Femme-Sovereign-of-WAP-and-the-Virtual-Realm-Shines-at ‘Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm’ Shines at Canada Gallery&nbsp;By Yume Murphy This review was originally published by Observer on March 19th, 2021. Observer retains all rights and licenses for this article. The orginal article can be read here. Below is a reproduction: Canada’s most recent group exhibition, “Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm,” reimagines a Black feminine temporality. Virtual and material realms collapse into each other, online existence bleeding into IRL representations of Black femininity, coagulating into a celebratory vision of the matrix in which blackness, femininity, and embodiment live. Black Femme does not dream of futurity as a utopic escape. It weaves and stitches together an abundantly colorful embodiment of the Black femme body through time and space, arriving at a future that is simultaneously present. “Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm” is a celebration of the networked errors and glitches tied to the Black femme body. The group show, which is open through April 10th, is curated by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle and features six Black women artists––Caitlin Cherry, Delphine Desane, Emily Manwaring, Kenya (Robinson), Sydney Vernon and Qualeasha Wood––whose work across digital and analog mediums “dismantle the restrictive societal confines imposed on the black femme body.” The title of the exhibition, both a reference to Cardi B’s sexually-charged “WAP” and Wireless Access Point (WAP), feels like an answer to miscalculations between race, gender and class often made by non-Black cyber feminists; Black femmes must navigate racialized embodiment both online and offline, despite cyberfeminists’ utopic vision of a virtual disembodiment that transcends race. Through a combination of paintings, videos, textiles and drawings, the artists explore this reality. <img width="1196" height="1550" width_o="1196" height_o="1550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecedf6923400d84cf88b510503c6cac33f3c7d805ffe7d8b735aa375bc4806f7/Qualeasha-Wood-fore-the-day-you-die-you-gon-touch-the-sky-2021.jpeg" data-mid="108533476" border="0" alt="fore the day you die, you gon&rsquo; touch the sky, (2021) by Qualeasha Wood. Image courtesy Canada Gallery" data-caption="fore the day you die, you gon’ touch the sky, (2021) by Qualeasha Wood. Image courtesy Canada Gallery" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ecedf6923400d84cf88b510503c6cac33f3c7d805ffe7d8b735aa375bc4806f7/Qualeasha-Wood-fore-the-day-you-die-you-gon-touch-the-sky-2021.jpeg" /> Qualeasha Wood’s pixelesque Jacquard tapestry, fore the day you die, you gon’ touch the sky, confidently weaves anachronistic religious and contemporary culture references with a wicked swagger. The tapestry presents a self portrait of Woods as Black messiah–the title being a reference to the chorus of Kanye West’s semi-religious “Touch The Sky,” wherein which he boasts of his predestined arrival at heaven’s gates. Left shoulder visibly outstretched to imply the presence of a phone, Wood’s is immortalized in selfie pose, adorned by glimmering glass bead halo and crimson crucifixion wound on her visible hand. Above her, decorative arched frames serve as symbolic screens, the blue woven sky appearing visibly pixelated while digital cursors point to Woods, prevailing on a medium they were never intended for–much like Black Jesus. A rendition of the hands from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam foregrounds this religiosity. In the world of this tapestry, Black femme as immaterial messiah is only a click away. Black Jesus is a woman and she’s online. In a similar vein, Caitlin Cherry’s Her Burnout Tesseract, reimagines the way we see the bodies of celebrities, Insta baddies, and memed personalities alike. In her large scale painting, femme figures, including the infamous twin models Shannon and Shannade Clermont, the viral Nicole TV, and rapper Flo Milli, are rendered almost unrecognizable under seemingly lenticular iridescence–with the exception of Nicole, who noticeably retains realistic brown skin as the sole femme pictured whose online presence boils down to being entirely made a meme. Windows, or sections, of the pictorial space are disjointed, greyscale renderings bordering high-contrast chromatic swirls of color that mimic the digital screen under pressure when broken or pressed beyond its limits. This effect serves the Black femmes in the painting like camouflage, if what was being camouflaged was the metallic and delirious plumage of a peacock; for the Black women making a living through presentations of their bodies online, Cherry’s painting creates a hyper-saturated playground for them to seek refuge. These viral femmes who navigate self-representation in commodified online spaces become more inconvenient to appropriate, consume, and ultimately re-appropriate in light of this added dimensionality, asserting a Black feminine aesthetic that is coded by having some skin in the game. The glitched nature of the painting is delightful in so far as it creates space for an existence that transcends the skin of the body. <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7f4c56bd2d1246798b8e59880d89578c9ed9f74be35e282f21b5fc3772250c7/CACH2021-001.jpeg" data-mid="108597633" border="0" alt="Her Burnout Tesseract, (2021) by Caitlin Cherry. Image courtesy Canada Gallery " data-caption="Her Burnout Tesseract, (2021) by Caitlin Cherry. Image courtesy Canada Gallery " src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d7f4c56bd2d1246798b8e59880d89578c9ed9f74be35e282f21b5fc3772250c7/CACH2021-001.jpeg" /> Emily Manwaring’s mixed media portrait also takes specific interest in a group of Black femmes. Swans Nwa pandan Matinée, which translates to “black swans during matinée” in Haitian Creole, imagines Black ballerinas free from any evidence of Eurocentric beauty standards. The black swans wear a uniform of large gold hoop earrings and acrylic nails, casually stretching, dancing, and talking in a familiar disorder. Manwaring affectionately adds texture through the addition of feathers, sequins, bobby pins, and a cheeky but ubiquitous price sticker on the painted Eco Style gel jar pictured next to the toothbrush intended for laying edges, baby hairs. In the midst of hair products, a small mirror of a makeup compact reflects a sweet self-portrait of Manwaring herself, who points a downward neutral gaze. Manwaring portrays a scene that despite not having much of a mainstream precedent, feels uniquely like a homecoming of sorts. This hybrid scene marries the world of ballet with intimate knowledge of Black feminine culture.Delphine Desane’s paintings provide an intriguing corollary to this tone. I have a rendez-vous with Life displays a regal femme figure in a lush surreal landscape. Against the fluid backdrop of pastel blue skies and pink rolling hills, the femme figure’s dark complexion and stiffness are exaggerated, firmly planted with her visible fist tightly closed, while long and lacquered flowing strands of hair become entangled in tendrils of green that form the path ahead. The portrait takes its name from a Countee Cullen poem describing the tension inherent in having a lust for life in the face of anti-Black prejudice and hardship. Thus, the figure’s face lay stoic, cautious of the unseen path ahead, though her surroundings imply whimsy and a sense of playfulness. In To no longer think. Second act, Desane resolves this feeling of uncertainty. The same regal figure is seen up close, outfitted in a more extravagant dress against a more somber, and more teal backdrop, presumably hardened by the course she’s had to take. <img width="2500" height="1667" width_o="2500" height_o="1667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/074438fd96db7a17605705960df6a720dcbc06d29e0c82bd3d116b205baa57fc/BlackFemmeInstall_2.jpeg" data-mid="108597530" border="0" alt="Installation view of Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm curated by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle. Image courtesy Canada Gallery" data-caption="Installation view of Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm curated by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle. Image courtesy Canada Gallery" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/074438fd96db7a17605705960df6a720dcbc06d29e0c82bd3d116b205baa57fc/BlackFemmeInstall_2.jpeg" /> Sydney Vernon’s deconstructed diptych, Untying Loose Ends, a mixed media portrait, and Tying Loose Ends, an almost six-minute video, pay homage to a familial matriarch. Lovingly, Vernon uses video, pastel, charcoal, paint, and X-ray imaging to conjure an intimate retrospective of one’s life, of what they sought to do and desired. Her mixed media portrait offers a farewell that seeks to remember rather than erase the unraveling of one’s interiority and inner life that often comes with passing. Kenya (Robinson)’s work closes the show. Tucked away in a smaller viewing room, If I’d Known You Were Coming, I’d’ve Made You a Cake, a plastic resin sculpture, shares the space with (Robinson)’s video Patriot Games No 03052021. The video collages footage of Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance, an accompanying reaction video from Youtube vloggers Twinsthenewtrend, an instrumental from the viral “BeatBox” by teenage rapper SPOTEMGOTTEM, and visceral footage of (Robinson) sitting on what looks like red and blue Hostess CupCakes. The ensuing moving image opens a pandora’s box of grievances. Foremost, is the disreputation and destruction of late legend Whitney Houston in the public eye, but there is also much to be said for the broader implications of American policing and nationalism on the lives of Black American women. Footage of (Robinson)’s sitting on the cake becomes an erotic commentary on how the Black feminine body has been represented––wounds exploited, compressed, and fetishized as a sex object––when paired with cuts to Houston’s own powerful vocals and police presence at the Super Bowl. Throughout the video, the red of the cake, black of the skin, and the blue of (Robinson)’s strappy garments resound the violence that has become a fact of life for Black women. (Robinson)’s sculpture echoes these sentiments. We cannot have our cake and eat it too, so we might as well sit on it. https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Born-Digital-Newsletter-2020 Sat, 15 May 2021 14:10:26 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/WRITING-Born-Digital-Newsletter-2020 Born Digital, a Substack newsletter by Yume MurphyBorn Digital is a free Substack newsletter dedicated to discussing the intersection of internet culture, creative production, and identity from a Black diasporic lens. Founded by Murphy in December of 2020, they use the newsletter to share original and nuanced essays that consider how we might find love and freedom in the face of an increasingly commodified and surveillant world wide web. An excerpt from the about page: Some people are internet savvy, but I’d more aptly describe myself as an internet fiend. Growing up on the Web 2.0, I’ve flitted through social media, dating apps, and internet trends as they rapidly evolve, making my mark through mostly digital footprints. This newsletter is interested in unpacking those immaterial footprints; how our collective online production has shaped culture, and how digital spaces have largely reproduced many of the systems and violences present in the real world. Rather than simply covering news and trends, I’m interested in questioning everything relevant to the participatory networks and digital ecosystems that we’ve since come to know as ubiquitous parts of being online. I present to you Born Digital. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. <img width="1721" height="1204" width_o="1721" height_o="1204" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/573ad7a560273821365a2d220869717932424ca1c2608e3a9215bdf9681eb843/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_cef1a0bc-ec5f-41e0-8631-d570686533ea_1721x1204.jpeg" data-mid="108537087" border="0" data-rotation="0" alt="Graphic by Rebekka Dunlap for the New York Times" data-caption="Graphic by Rebekka Dunlap for the New York Times" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/573ad7a560273821365a2d220869717932424ca1c2608e3a9215bdf9681eb843/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_cef1a0bc-ec5f-41e0-8631-d570686533ea_1721x1204.jpeg" /> https://yumeinoue.com/VIDEO-senior-thesis-project-2020 Wed, 02 Sep 2020 19:45:19 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/VIDEO-senior-thesis-project-2020 NOW &amp; THEN: A COLLECTION OF UNDERGRADUATE HOME MOVIES, 2020 We tend to think of the archive as a repository of memories, things, and documents from the past. A technique that arrests the present into a past. What would happen if the bounds of the archive were further blurred or bent? Through home movies, I studied the archive’s relationship to private memory, and how inclusions of such private memories, in the form of digital home movies, could further liberate the archive, while simultaneously creating a more inclusive and varied narrativization of the past and centering media that is heavily re-mediated and lo-fi. Though I originally planned to dedicate the entirety of my thesis to an original theory and practice of a deep-fried media, COVID-19 and the need for remote learning pushed me to re-think how the marginalization and exclusion of media that is deep fried (that includes food, hair, and images/memes) has affected how we orient ourselves towards what is intimate &amp; remote, what is private and public, what is kept secret and what is revealed &amp; shared. Taking cue from the MoMA’s recent exhibition dedicated to amateur film and home movie, Private Lives Public Spaces, I set out to create a series of home movies that served as both video diary and testament to my time at Vassar.&nbsp;To read more click here. This project was completed in satisfaction of Vassar College’s Media Studies Senior Thesis requirements. https://yumeinoue.com/VIDEO-show-sell-2020 Wed, 02 Sep 2020 21:37:07 +0000 yume inoue murphy https://yumeinoue.com/VIDEO-show-sell-2020 SHOW &amp; SELL: A MINI DOCUMENTARY, 2020 <img width="868" height="488" width_o="868" height_o="488" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d4943b780e4df727fba5d9cda9e76950a049231b16c8f885571cfad9372d0aea/Screen-Shot-2020-09-21-at-14.07.22.png" data-mid="83344777" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/868/i/d4943b780e4df727fba5d9cda9e76950a049231b16c8f885571cfad9372d0aea/Screen-Shot-2020-09-21-at-14.07.22.png" /> “Since coming to Vassar, I’ve kind of felt, not let down but like maybe there wasnt as many opportunities for students who weren’t [studio] art majors to be involved with their art on campus. I feel like there are a lot of bars to accesibility on campus so I wanted to find a different space, off-campus, to make that space for people to present their art and kind of build a community.” - Caroline&nbsp;Caroline, a junior at Vassar College, hosts a self-run art gallery space in their home and shares how they’ve been able to continue to grow their self-taught art practice while in an academic space.&nbsp;I entirely directed, filmed, and edited this mini-documentary.&nbsp; To see more of Caroline’s art work, click here.&nbsp;