The work of Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles) engages the fluid definitions of reality and fiction of our contemporary world. In Knot Eye, her exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, Syms slips between genres, modes of representation and narrative-threads, with two new films and a concept store.
The exhibition presents RW-LO, 2026, which will have its theatrical premiere at the New York Film Festival in September. In the 22-minute docu-fantasy, set in the Garden District of New Orleans in the year 2000, Syms blends reenactments with home movies from the life of Brent David Freaney, a lifelong pop girlie, who was once, as vintage camcorder footage reveals, a Deep South teenager obsessed with outspoken Real World New Orleans castmate Melissa Howard. RW-LO is a nostalgic — and surprising — inquiry into what happens when people start being celebrities, and they stop being real.
The exhibition also premieres her film Ex Voto, 2026, a three-handed ensemble set in a New York apartment. A wrap party has ended. The Director and her two leads, The Actor and The It Boy, are drunk and high and don’t want to go home yet. The energy is intimate and charged and none of them know what happens next. The Director tries to explain all 11 dimensions and when she can’t, pulls up the first YouTube video. GOD HITS. We stay with The Director as she leaves this plane of reality. When The Directors returns The Actor reenacts her trip.
At the front of the gallery is the latest iteration of Dominica Publishing, that functions simultaneously as an artwork and concept store. Dominica Publishing, Syms overarching conceptual endeavour, is a practice of making ideas public and making publics around those ideas. It’s a way to play with form, format, desire, magic, mystery, and pop. As Syms notes, ‘I was a shop girl. Some people were servers. These jobs teach you everything there is to know about humanity.’
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