Our Future Was Ours - Darren Sylvester
Darren Sylvester's hyper-real photography seeks the human truths behind the gloss, writes Nick Dent
Bad entertainment often makes for good art; just look at the films of Andy Warhol, or David Lynch's Inland Empire.
Sylvester's highly staged, glossy tableaux starring angst-ridden teens look like grabs from the kind of bad television and movies that all too easily get government funding. Looking at a work such as If All We Have Is Each Other, That's OK (2003), you can almost hear the flat Neighbours dialogue, even as you can't smell the junk food they're eating (it's way too shiny and plastic for that).
Superbly composed and art directed, Sylvester's photos would do any advertising company proud, and the melodramatic titles he appends to them are haikus of high-camp: Don't Substitute a Life to Satisfy Mine; We Can Love Since We Know We Can Lose Love. But like Warhol, Sylvester, 34, blanks attempts to characterise him as a satirist or critic of consumerism. "We all consume," he says. "It's just a reflection of day-to-day life. I'm as bad as anyone else who reads magazines and has a desire for a new gadget or object. I'm just making little morality tales, or parables, within a photograph. Often dramatic moments in life have a lot of fast food or makeup or products or pop culture tagged with them."
"The pop culture references in his work make it accessible to many people," says Ursula Sullivan, whose Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art gallery has represented Sylvester since 2005. "Once you're in there you find he's talking about universal subjects like love, loneliness, hopes and dreams."
Sylvester's photographic and video work are the subjects of a show at the Australian Centre for Photography that spans the last decade.
During that time his working method has evolved from wandering around hospitals, airports and factories searching for lonely, sublime moments, to an exhaustive process to produce just one photograph.
"Everything's slowing down unfortunately," he says. "I've just taken two months to take one picture.
I spend a long time on lighting. The thought of just taking random pictures and seeing what happens doesn't interest me."
A recent self-portrait (left), If You Fall in Love Again You're a Little Bit Older, a Little Less Trusting (2006), proved one of his most difficult projects even though it was taken in his own home. "I filled my loungeroom with fake snow and built a wooden rig. My assistant ended up taking the picture. It was all done in a three metre square floorspace, trying to give the impression that it's outdoors."
Sylvester is a little surprised that he's still making a career at this. "The images sell well and the shows are constant, so they must achieve the goal I set out to do, which is to make these snapshots of life more heightened."
Darren Sylvester's Our Future Was Ours shows at the Australian Centre for Photography until 30 August.