Martine Syms’ solo exhibition, “Loser Back Home,” is an epic, multidimensional collage of material and media. It’s a labyrinthine of various avatars and personal significations spanning video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, forming a diaristic labyrinth of the artist’s identity, equally shaped and fractured by shifting perceptions and experiences. An all-consuming mass of content spans the entire second floor of the gallery—images and objects (created and found) are layered and spliced, magnified and distorted, pixilated and painted—forming a vortex of signs and signals that sucks you in just to spit you out, mimicking life’s endless loophole of self-construction and displacement. Syms presents identity as a constant construction site—a cruel and hilarious theater of sorts—a place of continual negotiation that inevitably leads inward (or “home,” as the title suggests), reminding us that being in a body is simultaneously securing and unsettling. Gleaned from personal archives and everyday encounters, Syms’ repetitive oversaturation of images and words becomes redundant to the point of obsoletion, relating to the ways in which we construct identity (especially since the advent of the internet and social media). Syms’ exhibition considers more nuanced and dimensional notions of displacement, as embodied and disembodied, as spacial and psychological. Aren’t we all strangers to ourselves every now and then?  

Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
On view through August 26, 2023