Cheryl Sim

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Cheryl Sim

Location

Montréal 45° 30' 11.46" N, 73° 34' 11.30" W Music Person

Cheryl Sim is a media artist, musician/composer, researcher and curator based in Montreal.

Her research interests include the diaspora and the post-colonial condition, spirituality and the nature of work, as well as conceptual art practices of the past, present and future. During the day she is Associate Curator at DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art and is a PhD candidate in études et pratiques des arts at the Université de Québec à Montréal.

Her latest work, Ode to the Cheongsam is a meditation on the cheongsam, or Chinese dress. Poetic voiceover, clips from a Hollywood film, family photos, images from inside a cheongsam tailor’s workshop, and a Mandarin pop song weave throughout the piece to create a portrait of what this dress means for the Chinese female diaspora in the present day. www.givideo.org

Like in her art, Cheryl exercises the power of hybridity in her music. She started in church choirs, played piano and clarinet in the school band, sang with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra chorus and joined her first "rock" band in 1996. Finally getting "off the page" she worked with two brothers from her home town in the trio Tulip and continued to forge ahead, singing on the streets of Miami and Montreal as part of a lounge duo called Olive which later evolved into the Montreal electronic lounge band named Gazelle. With Gazelle, she opened for the likes of Jay-Jay Johannson and Goldfrapp, and performed at the prestigious Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2000 and 2003.

As a solo artist, Cheryl launched Recline in 2002, a collection of treasured jazz standards, Heavy Petal, original songs tinged with soul and electronica, and finally Unsung, more stripped down, soul baring songs released in fall of 2011. www. cdbaby.com/cd/cherylsim