Darren Sylvester is a true multidisciplinary artist. He works in staged photography, sculpture, video, installation and music, drawing on a multitude of pop culture, advertising and fashion references, filtering ideas and images back through re-creations and fabrications that have a strange verisimilitude. His work transforms well-known products as ‘readymades’, as a vehicle for looking at the ways we live with, and are shaped by, branding; to be transformed into a discussion on contemporary ennui, desirability, authenticity and mortality - all presented in high-gloss finish.
Sylvester has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Currently, his mid-career survey exhibition Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something is on at NGV, Australia. Selected solo shows include Out of Life (2018) Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney; Darren Sylvester (2017) Neon Parc, Melbourne; Broken Model, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2016); NADA Miami (2014); Darren Sylvester – Take Me To You, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore (2010); and the major survey exhibition Our Future Was Ours, Australia Centre for Photography, Sydney (2008). His work is held in a many public collections such as the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Western Australia.
In advance of the opening of his exhibition Forever Twenty One at Neon Parc, Steven Stewart, Gertrude's Exhibition and Studio Coordinator checked in with Darren about his current goings-on.
Steven Stewart: Your 2019 is off to a big start – you’re about to open a solo show at Neon Parc (city) on the heels of your first large-scale solo exhibition in a public institution. How are you holding up and what can we expect to see at Neon Parc?
Darren Sylvester: Thank you, the NGV show has taken a good part of three years of planning and development. We started designing the book for instance two years ago and I’ve been lucky to work with an amazing team at NGV that enabled myself to work with them in all aspects of the show from design, publication and merchandise. Such a rare and unique opportunity, I knew I had to work on it completely. Then Geoff Newton at Neon Parc suggested the idea to introduce a small show where they would both close at the same time. Forever Twenty One will act as an echo across the streets with work that speaks to those at NGV – together they’ll form a linked bracelet effect.
You're a material polymath, and I love that your sculpture and installations don’t necessarily need a photographic hinge, but your process has an obvious bedrock in photography and photographic values. Where does your heart really lie in terms of medium?
Photography is the end game of a studio built sculpture, something ephemeral and lo-fi, usually too big for a gallery piece, and generally something where a person or people are involved to complete the work. If I want the viewer to position themselves alongside the piece physically, I leave it as sculpture, however if a work requires people inside it, it becomes a photograph. In all cases the backbone is something physically built so perhaps sculpture is the core to everything. I position music making as sculpture as well, the act of recording, mixing, adding colour, and then scaling back, building up, etc.
You've described your work before as "many tabs open in a browser" which speaks to the banality of sourcing stimuli. Is your practice of object and image making somehow an effort to reclaim desire by complimenting digital procedures with tactile and material interventions?
The ‘many tabs open in a browser’ references how my work doesn’t have much in the way of consistency in its use of subject or medium. I don’t mean it as sourcing stimuli, it’s meant as a reflection of day to day activity. Tabs to me means contemporary life jumping from one information source to another with every click. Celebrity gossip clicks to murder in the city, to a purchase on FarFetch, to scrolling on social media, the relentless background noise, all while relaxing with coffee in the morning. I’m reflecting this with what I take in and then what interests me.
Do you think of your visual art practice and musical projects as parallel lines that sometimes cross, or are those things “one song”, a plural endeavour?
They cross over in some ways. I don’t put labels on anything to differentiate them. Perhaps the music is more fantastical, I like creating a world out of sound. I don’t know, I'm comfortable in my studio and the next day working on a pop song, the next with fabric suppliers, then steel fabricators. It's freedom in creating anything.
Merchandising and the way commercial display correlates with contemporary sculpture is a popular trope. Do you consider your work as involved with a display based practice?
Yes, gallery installation and high end department stores like Dover Street Market cross over a lot in my mind. Their stores in Ginza and New York were initial inspirational references for the layout out of the NGV exhibition. Or inCéline which directly references an interest in shop design and branding. When I'm overseas I spend equal times in galleries and malls and if I take notes on inspiration they are divided fairly equally.
Do you have any more forthcoming projects you can share with me?
Hopefully I’ll begin to work on a new album this winter and some opportunities will come along from these exhibitions.
Darren Sylvester is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
