"Balustrade Stake"
Darren Sylvester
Sullivan+Strumpf
799 Elizabeth St Zetland Sydney NSW 2017 Australia
P +61 2 9698 4696 e-mail:
4 June > 18 July, 2020
Each of Sylvester’s exhibitions is the result of a detailed process of planning and research, involving a wide range of pop culture moments and artefacts, designed to investigate the language between perceived high and low culture, authenticity, desirability and mortality. In Balustrade Stake, props and sets built in studio are photographed with his continued use of large format transparencies, creating intense saturated hyper-real images while wood carvings are turned into patinated rose gold bronze sculptures.
In Psychics house and Burning candle, two full-scale sidewalk sets with custom neon signs become New York city styled venders. Each neon sign showcased from out from their buildings acts as a call and advertisement of a spiritual or psychic power available to you inside.
Scattered throughout the gallery are three bronze ‘vampire’ stakes. Reminiscent of film props and finished not dissimilar to Cartier Juste un Clou bracelets, these carved wooden stakes have had their potential power to vanquish vampires with wood rendered useless by bronze casting, resulting in literal weapons with titles like charms; Bat stake, Bone stake and Balustrade stake.
Thematically, the balustrade appears again with a photograph of an oversized dream-like prop-staircase with ripped balustrade held out against an invisible enemy by an editorial model stretching across the frame in Balustrade stepper.
The saturated editorial style imagery continues with Overnight web, picturing a brass spider web that Sylvester made, lifted in design from an image of actress Carroll Borland advertising the film Mark of the Vampire (1935), her face pressed against a prop-built web that never appears in the film – a false ruse, advertising a moment that doesn’t exist. Here that same web returns illuminated in faux-morning light to serve as a beautiful trap, positioned within the same neon filled window structures shown elsewhere in the exhibition.
This dream-like installation hovers between violence, desire and prop house, presenting an environment providing pictorial opportunities with psychic mediums and literal self-defence weapons for unseen questions and enemies nobody knows.
In Psychics house and Burning candle, two full-scale sidewalk sets with custom neon signs become New York city styled venders. Each neon sign showcased from out from their buildings acts as a call and advertisement of a spiritual or psychic power available to you inside.
Scattered throughout the gallery are three bronze ‘vampire’ stakes. Reminiscent of film props and finished not dissimilar to Cartier Juste un Clou bracelets, these carved wooden stakes have had their potential power to vanquish vampires with wood rendered useless by bronze casting, resulting in literal weapons with titles like charms; Bat stake, Bone stake and Balustrade stake.
Thematically, the balustrade appears again with a photograph of an oversized dream-like prop-staircase with ripped balustrade held out against an invisible enemy by an editorial model stretching across the frame in Balustrade stepper.
The saturated editorial style imagery continues with Overnight web, picturing a brass spider web that Sylvester made, lifted in design from an image of actress Carroll Borland advertising the film Mark of the Vampire (1935), her face pressed against a prop-built web that never appears in the film – a false ruse, advertising a moment that doesn’t exist. Here that same web returns illuminated in faux-morning light to serve as a beautiful trap, positioned within the same neon filled window structures shown elsewhere in the exhibition.
This dream-like installation hovers between violence, desire and prop house, presenting an environment providing pictorial opportunities with psychic mediums and literal self-defence weapons for unseen questions and enemies nobody knows.
 | Darren Sylvester |
mpefm
AUSTRALIA art press release
