Darren Sylvester: Dreams within a dream

Abigail Moncrieff, Curator of The National 2021: New Australian Art at Carriageworks enters into the liminal space between reality and artifice in Darren Sylvester’s emotional landscapes.

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s final film. Released in 1999, the filmmaker finalised his edit of the film and died six days later. Both an erotic mystery and a psychological drama, the screenplay draws from a 1929 Austrian novel, ‘Traumnovelle’ or (‘Dream Story’) by Arthur Schnitzler, who describes the psycho-sexual milieu and the cultural overturnings of early 20th century Vienna. ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ shares the same hypnotic sexuality and feverish, dream-like visions of Schnitzler’s novel, but transposed to a New York City setting and a time contemporaneous to the making of the film, in the 1990s. ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was almost exclusively filmed in the UK, requiring sets to be built at Pinewood Studios, located outside of central London. The famously fastidious and perfectionist filmmaker was obsessed with verisimilitude in this undertaking - Kubrick sent set builders to Manhattan to measure the widths of footpaths, and to note the location of newspaper vending machines, in his re-creation of Greenwich Village. In this film, each encounter has the intensity of a dream, one in which the moment is clear, but it’s hard to remember where we have come from or where we are going next.

The three neon windows of Sylvester’s work for The National 2021 are similarly intricately calibrated- set architecturally into the walls of the gallery at Carriageworks and presented at full scale. Styled as New York City shopfronts, the highly saturated colours of the neon symbols act as an advertisement of a spiritual or psychic power available within. Sylvester re-imagines the gallery as a street, a film set we can stroll through, encountering the windows on our way. Less immersive than Kubrick’s Greenwich Village, the works gesture towards a mise-en-scene, the green illumination of Burning candle is set within a carefully constructed partial brick façade, while the glittering circles and moon surrounding Crystal Room are protected by security bars placed in front, to either protect its power from outside dangers or perhaps to contain the energy within. The pulsating pink and blue Psychic’s House Neon is placed in front of a blind, cunningly framed by an architectural construct that suggests a building in which the window might be placed. The saturated glow of these works are an evocation, a continual circling of desire that is without arrival or destination.

Sylvester began making staged studio photography in 1998, building sets and props to create miniature encapsulated worlds. Two of these window settings were first developed as photographs for Sylvester’s Balustrade Stake exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf Gallery in June 2020. The windows are portals, their psychic symbols metaphors for unknown emotional and spiritual questions, laced with both fear and promise. Portals have appeared in Sylvester’s work before, his photographic work Horizons (2019) depicts a window on an airplane. In this image, Sylvester places us up in the clouds, inside the plane looking out over an infinite and ungraspable sky – it is a journey of desire with unknown destination. However, the portals described by the neon windows for The National 2021 are reversed and a perceptual conundrum, as we are not outside gazing in, as the works might suggest, but inside the gallery, looking further in. The radiant illumination of Crystal Room reflects off the textured wall of the Carriageworks building seen clearly behind it, bouncing back into the gallery space. Active and turning, Sylvester describes the setting of these works as akin to a jumper that has been taken off and left turned inside out.

A gentle breeze of warm air travels through the windows as we walk through the gallery, complicating our perception even further. We are experiencing the architecture of the gallery in its totality, air flows through the interior egress between the gallery wall and the Carriageworks building and floats into the gallery through Sylvester’s windows. Back of house workers appear briefly in Sylvester’s work, framed behind the windows as they move through this interstitial space. Teetering between reality and artifice, these works are dreams within a dream, an emotional landscape to be collectively understood.

The National 2021: New Australian Art at Carriageworks until June 20 2021