VANITIES // 0055

Pride

SHL0MS’ artworks often revolve around the absence of something rather than its presence. In the 2022 work $CAR, they destroyed a Lamborghini and auctioned off the scans of its parts. Since then they’ve made art in the form of blank pages, empty tokens, and the negative space created when posting the right text characters on X. In 𝚅𝙰𝙽𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙴𝚂 , SHL0MS displaces another icon: the celebrity mirror selfie.

Each selfie is digitally reconstructed to remove the celebrity themselves while restoring the space they occupy with photorealistic fidelity. The result is a modified readymade which decontextualizes an image that was previously loaded with cultural signifiers, embodied in the celebrity, in order to refocus attention on their banal (and oftentimes quietly absurd) surroundings.

These modified images and their precursors are combined into a video piece in which the celebrity subject, often posing bizarrely or self-hypersexualized, flickers disjointedly back into the frame in a strobing pattern encoding their legal name. The number of frames in each piece is defined by the subject's Instagram following, and the collection is subsequently ranked linearly by duration, linking each individual's relative online value to the runtime of the piece.

In SHL0MS’ work, pride is embodied both within each celebrity’s curated image, as well as through the viewer’s own investment in the status their image represents. With the celebrity removed, the work asks the audience to notice what they project into the void: desire, derision, aspiration, complicity. The mirror still reflects, but now all that appears is the spectator’s relationship to the celebrity complex itself.