I guess I can be a little mischievous!
— Martine Syms
My mum was very interested in art and liked to write, and my dad was a hobbyist photographer.
It's very comforting to feel myself getting stronger.
Representation is a sort of surveillance.
Los Angeles is an uncanny place to live. It has many science fiction qualities. For example, when I'm standing in line at the supermarket and I recognise the person in front of me, but I can't figure out how I know them. Suddenly, I realise I saw them in some random commercial six years ago.
I had a studio visitor ask me when a piece was complete, and afterward, I realized I was kind of annoyed by the question. I wrote down to myself, 'Nothing's ever finished' as an operating value.
I think of entrepreneurship as a way of creating value.
Growing up in a specific area has a certain sociological and economic reason, so I'm interested in using myself as a case study to look as those things.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist I learned about pretty early on. She's one of the first contemporary artists I knew about and was really drawn to.
I've always been interested in the manufacturing of narratives, identities, and ideologies, and how they are embodied and negotiated by viewers.
A lot of my work, the subject is film and television itself, and history, and how that kind of coincides with larger cultural history and memory.
I grew up in Altadena, California.
My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.
I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.
I have said it before and I will continue to say that I don't think art is the most effective form of protest. I don't think it changes policy; I think it changes discourse, and discourse can change ideas, and for me, that's what it's about: having that space for conversation.
I grew up watching tons and tons of television. It was all I would do, especially during summer vacations.
There's no reason to be ashamed of feeling good.
There's a certain amount of absurdity to the idea that having extremely crisp clothes is what's going to get you through the door. And there's a certain sad reality to it, too.
Pop culture or advertising doesn't work perfectly. No one is watching and mindlessly accepting every part of the narrative or ideology.
I'm interested in the economy of words and forms: jokes, aphorisms, copywriting, advertising, that way of writing when meaning has to be squeezed into as few words as possible.
I just have a deadpan sense of humor, I guess.
I think I do more fiction than autobiography.
I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.
I grew up in Los Angeles. I watched lots of television; I still watch lots of television.
I'm so voracious with books, movies, TV, and I'm always interested in the way that different cultural values are presented or, in their absence, are present.
It's weird how the Internet changes everything. The kind of narrow casting... instead of reaching for a broad audience, you are reaching for a more targeted audience.
I'm really obsessed with this show right now called 'Power,' produced by 50 Cent.
One of my early memories is of a white girl twirling in a circle. I realized later on that it was from that show 'Small Wonder' - the oldest I could have been when I was watching it was four or five, but it's one I think about a lot. It's stuck in my head, this terrible Fox television show.
People act like art is a white thing - or not for people of colour - when, really, so much culture and art comes from people of colour. I want everyone to get into what I am doing. So sometimes I don't like to work just in an art context because it feels like a lot of people aren't going to see it. I like it to be a part of everyday life.
If some things don't make me feel good, I stop them. How simple, yet so hard to do.
I played sports growing up, and I worked out a lot. Then, when I moved back to L.A., I just fell off everything.
Entrepreneurs create value; I wanted to create ideas that became machines for making value.
I never understood why anyone cared about the Kardashians until a friend, who's Latina, told me that she liked them because they're a family who look like hers. I was able to appreciate them differently.
When I'm working on something, even when I don't know exactly where it's going, I have a sense of what I'd like to make. So maybe doing things right is following that sense even when I stop trusting myself. The rightness is in the process, even if it doesn't match up with my plans.
My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.
I think the medium or format of distributing things has its own characteristics. I think that an exhibition can communicate certain things that a video can't, and publications communicate that in a different way.
There's an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you've been somewhere or you know something when you really don't.
I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.
I was very conscious of the film industry - a lot of people, neighbors, worked in it. I actually grew up doing a bit of extra work myself. I was homeschooled, and it was a way that I could make money. My parents let us do these jobs, and I never got very far, but I was much more interested in what everybody else was doing, and I liked being on set.
At some point, all black movies became biopics. All the good, serious ones became biopics. 'Ray,' 'Ali'... those types of movies, those are the opportunities available for mostly men. Those are the opportunities for a black actor to transcend 'black' movies. They have to play a black icon.
I definitely think an on-screen experience is universal, in a way.
