In conjunction with the exhibition Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only (2016).

Martine Syms draws on early cinema history and the language of television for "Laughing Gas," the pilot episode of a situation comedy titled She Mad. This television series is part of an ongoing conceptual project that Syms initiated in 2015 with the work Pilot for a Show about Nowhere, which in its early stages took the form of an installation of documents, images, and research materials filtered through a semiautobiographical account of Syms's life as a young black woman trying to "make it" as an artist in Los Angeles. The research for this project and a large part of Syms's work to date is part of an investigation of the formation of black subjectivities on both sides of American television production. Syms addresses not only on-screen representation but the assumed target audiences within American television history. Early programs were responsible for giving, in Syms's words, "visibility to a private black sphere."