Martine Syms: Present Goo

About

This September, the artist and filmmaker Martine Syms will present a group of new works – spanning film, installation, drawing and photography – at the Davies Street gallery in Mayfair. Syms’ new works encompass three distinct groupings, that each represent new avenues in her ongoing critical examination of narrative production. Distinguished by a versatile and research-based approach to her art, Syms’ multifarious practice draws on both personal and historical references that speak to the nature of contemporary life and human experience.

In three new video works, Syms looks to surveillance footage, as well as clips drawn from myriad sources to create nuanced filmic collages. Syms consciously mediates the way in which technology – for example, the editing of the moving image, sound and its physical modes of viewing – may be deployed to evoke or alter the impression of perspective and character.

Shown in dialogue with these are several enlarged photographic wallpapers and drawings. By contrast to the intricacies of technological process and its temporal outcomes, these are created with relative immediacy, offering a series of fixed vignettes that might equally communicate personal or social expression.

Within these works, Syms addresses the means of representation and its effects upon performed or imposed identities, as well as the covert yet pervasive systems of power, revealing how the subtleties of technique may bear upon its subject.