Brian Sykes

Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Artist statement

I am a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist working as 7 Metrix, creating across music, visual art, film, performance, design, and community-centered storytelling. My practice explores memory, identity, Black life in Chicago, emotional vulnerability, faith, family, and the environments that shape us before we fully understand their impact. My interdisciplinary path began with "Inner-City Madness (2014)", a visual art project that examined the emotional and psychological complexity of urban life and became an early foundation for the way I now connect image, sound, place, and personal narrative across mediums. I do not see these disciplines as separate; I use sound, image, movement, and space as connected languages that allow me to build immersive worlds around a central idea. That language evolved through projects such as "Study In Blue", which used instrumental music and the emotional associations of color to explore introspection, and later "I Heard The City Breathe", an interdisciplinary project combining original music, film, exhibition, live performance, artist collaboration, and youth participation. Together, these works reflect my interest in how personal memory can become cultural memory and how art can preserve the emotional realities of Black life in Chicago. "I Heard The City Breathe" expanded that practice into a living archive, using multiple forms of expression to document the city across generations. My next project, "Before I Knew the Words", turns that...

Artwork