Let BIG SISTER Elevate Your Vibes
Signe Pierce, the evocative performance artist behind the haunting short film American Reflexxx, is back with a new project: pop star BIG SISTER.
BIG SISTER was first conceived in 2015 at “Authority Figure,” an event the late SOPHIE helped soundtrack. “We had been crossing paths energetically but never in real life,” Pierce tells PAPER. Later, in 2019, the two collaborated at Grimes’ Bio-Haque Rave during Miami Beach Art Basel, during which they played their song “Do You Wanna Be Alive.” Years later, the song is featured on the auteur’s posthumous album, right as BIG SISTER is introduced to the public for the first time. Simultaneously, the pop star debuted her single, “FUCK REALITY,” which was first conceived in 2020, “when it kind of felt like the world was ending.”
Pierce tells PAPER: “In the chorus of “FUCK REALITY,” I say, “I can’t stand this hate-matrix/ I guess I’ll go make love to it.” She describes the Hatrix as the news, the politicians, the ads, the algorithms, “Big Brother.” “BIG SISTER and the music that I make is an antidote to Orwell’s Big Brother concept, which I see mirrored in this current Hatrix that we are all currently experiencing in technocratic modernity,” she says.
Read PAPER’s entire conversation with BIG SISTER below.
You’ve said your goal is for BIG SISTER to fuse pop stars as performance art “whilst exploring perceptions of reality in the digital age.” What sort of pop iconography and stars have you felt inspired by for this project?
The range of people that I’m inspired by is a huge spectrum of individuals — pop stars and artists, ancient poets, yogis, mystic sages, motivational speakers, fitness coaches, characters from sci-fi books and films, philosophers and reality stars. I’ve always thought that pop stars, musicians, artists, athletes and politicians are like mythological creatures… the kinds you see in Renaissance paintings or ancient renderings of deities. To be truly “iconic” is to execute your consciousness at a level which enables others to feel something inherently true about the human experience, and in doing so, one can hope to potentially inspire others to feel more free safe and real in this world.
You’re about to have your work with SOPHIE, “Do You Wanna Be Alive,” get featured on her posthumous album. How does it feel to have that collaboration come out now, of all times, as you’re embarking on this next project?
It’s a moment of transformation. I’m coming into a new form and expanding into new territory of both artistry, and identity, which is what SOPHIE was all about. I met her in late 2019 and we immediately began collaborating together. We had been fans of each other’s work for a long time, and she immediately saw a pop star in me and encouraged me to pivot to music. She ripped the portal open. She put me in my first vocal booth, she coaxed rhymes out of my lips, she read my poetry and helped me filter it into lyrics. She put me on my first stage (at Grimes’ Bio-Haque Rave in 2019) where we performed “Do You Wanna Be Alive” for the first (and only) time. And then in early 2020, when I unexpectedly experienced an earth-shattering spiritual awakening/kundalini consciousness rip, she advised me to write it out, learn Ableton and pledged that we would make a record out of my demos once the pandemic was over.
When she died in 2021, I experienced these wild waves of metaphysical and psychic-spiritual energy pulsing through the fields, which I’m honestly still processing. It feels cheap to try to explain it, but all I can really say is I am still learning from her and feeling guided by her, despite the fact that she is no longer in the material world. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who feel this way, too. She touched so many people and will continue to do so, eternally.
So this current moment is an interesting feeling of a butterfly exiting a chrysalis, which my friend and mentor helped me construct. That friend and mentor is no longer here, but in a weird way, she still is through her poetry and music and in the gifts that she imbued into me through our time together. I feel like – since 2019, I’ve been going through something of a transformation. It’s a shift into being my true higher self, actualized. And that’s BIG SISTER.
What lessons did you learn from SOPHIE?
I think one of the most profound learning points that I gleaned from knowing SOPHIE was in observing her way of shaking people up and pushing them to transcend beyond their current form. Pushing people out of their comfort zone and into the hyperreal. She embodied that, but she also inspired it in everyone she came into contact with.
Her presence had this alchemical fire to it… she had a capacity to explode your chakras and expose the cobwebs which were taking up too much space in the nervous system. You might have some limiting beliefs or subconscious blocks and then you meet her and she’s like “Okay, get over that, time to be a superstar.” Her presence was a cause of spiritual activation and creative inspiration for me, which also led to a deep period of integration, in a Jungian sense. I had to integrate my shadows and demons in order to get unblocked and do this work. Clearing out the fear, embracing the awkwardness of entering a new era, and getting into the flow of change, in order to come true, and be truly alive. And I think that’s what our song is about.
This is the greatest lesson I’ve taken from SOPHIE: Do it now. Be alive, now. Be hyperreal. Make the art, make the songs, share it, build community. Go find what is unique and true to you, and then do it all the way. Shed the fear, be that bitch and create the art and culture that you wish to exist within. This is what it means to be hyperreal. This is what it means to fuck reality, raw and hard. Make it nasty, make it pop.
We all have that inside of us, I think. And SOPHIE had it more than anyone I have ever met, in my entire life.
Your work has long tackled subjects like identity and perception, like in American Reflexxx, among other themes. How do you see pop music as a vessel, or practice, to further expand your artistic vision?
I’ve always been interested in tipping the fields of what is considered to be “acceptable” or normal as an artist/human. I’ve been playing with reality and “the self” as a medium since 2011, which led to American Reflexxx and a lot of different experimentations in performing in galleries and museums, as well as on the streets. And yet despite having had success in art, I would always joke that I felt like “a singer without a song.” This was before meeting SOPHIE and beginning the journey of developing my music. I was always sharing pictures and poetic musings and wearing provocative outfits in my art, but there wasn’t a beat to contain it.
A theme that SOPHIE and I have in common is this unquenchable desire to explore what it means to be truly alive and authentic and to exist artfully. I call it “Reality Art.” We both feel an instinctual urge to create art which wants to sniff out the carnal truth of this earthly existence, beyond the indoctrinations of society ,normality and false identity, beyond whatever “the simulatrix” or your parents or the government has told you you “should” be.
I think that out of every single format of artistry that exists, the place where you can best explore this act of artful existence is in the realm of being a Pop Star. Pop Stars are Reality Artists. Pop Stars use their own selves and their own lives and experiences to articulate major psycho-spiritual existentialist concepts for the masses to consume and feel. They chasm their archetypes into avatars and “eras” and albums. It feels like the most modern form of art available to us in the 21st century, in the sense that it’s a transmedia performance art, rooted in the sacred act of music, rhythm and vibration and bringing people together. I see limitless potential for what’s possible in this next phase of this transformation.
Photography: Jivi Emir
Signe Pierce, the evocative performance artist behind the haunting short film American Reflexxx, is back with a new project: pop star BIG SISTER. BIG SISTER was first conceived in 2015 at “Authority Figure,” an event the late SOPHIE helped soundtrack. “We had been crossing paths energetically but never in real life,” Pierce tells PAPER. Later,…