Darren Sylvester

I would still call myself simply ‘artist’. It feels natural to me to move from space to space, medium to medium. I try and stay true to whatever an idea is, so if that idea comes through best in song, then make a song. If it needs to be an elaborate set photographed, then I do that too.

I would stage photographs because I’d want an idea to be, for instance, of people doing something in particular in a particular place – and you’re not always going to find that out in the street –, so I had to make it, usually in my studio. Even if it was a picture outdoors, I'd hire fake grass and use that. I’d call it B-grade set production.
Part of this meant I’d have some consistency, as I use the same group of old theatre lights to illuminate everything. The other aspect that made the images pop like an advertisement was that I’ve always used transparency film, which gives great colour saturation and clarity, almost cold. It’s a practice not used much because it’s expensive and takes time. Even in advertising it’s not used much anymore, I imagine.

I think my practice with constant change rings true for an internet age. I’ve described my work as ‘many tabs open in a browser’ – lots of stories about different things at the same time. We’ve had newspapers, however, in the morning now, when I go through my run of daily websites, I take in a lot of information in the first hour of the day. It also means I can research something in great detail and really quickly. An example would be a video from 2008, I was the last in the Carpenters garden, where I rebuilt the Los Angeles soft rock group The Carpenters’ Downey California back garden to 1:1 scale.

Karen Carpenter had died there years earlier, and the house was up for sale to be demolished. I had the idea to rebuild it but only had a week to get all the details, so I signed up and contacted people who were attending a final open-house through a Carpenters online forum. I became friends and requested photos for reference. I used Google street maps to go above the house to figure the size and layout. YouTube had walkthroughs where I could see how trees were positioned, and so for a number of months, I made it. That would be impossible without the internet.

Humour is used as a masking agent to something deeper going on, like a misanthropy towards people, fear of dying. Things like that. There needs to be a refracting of an idea so things can be read on the surface and underneath. I’d say that is the main recipe. Images, sculptures or pop music all have a glass-like surface, bright and intense, however, weeds underneath.

I always had a guitar and played in a band at university, so that was always laying around. However, in 2008, I pitched an idea to a museum: that I would make them a pop album. The album would be on vinyl as a sculpture with one side on repeat all day. I went to a music store and bought software, a synthesiser and a microphone, went home and started to put short stories to music. In four months, I’d written the album, played the instruments and mixed it. The album was picked up by a record label and released. Since then, I’ve released two further albums, Off by Heart in 2013, and Touch a Tombstone last year.

For You began as paintings in 2001 that were titled, I Care for You. I wanted to paint but didn’t want to mix colours, so I contacted Clinique, who provided me with their cosmetic range for the season – colours I presumed would automatically look good as they had been market tested. I converted the cosmetics into paint and sprayed them onto clear acrylic, so when flipped around, they acted like mirrors. Because the colour was designed to look good on people, you did too, so the title was just that, I Care for You. I made other versions of these with updated colours from new seasons in later years.
One evening, I was at a club with a light-up dancefloor and people wanted me to dance; I didn’t because I was too shy and awkward. Sitting there I thought, ‘if only you could always look good’, so the idea was conceived to swap paint for light, and then a simplified title, For You. I asked Yves Saint Laurent to provide their range and converted lipsticks, eyeshadows and foundations to light. 

It looks like a stylised makeup compact washed in market-researched lighting. It’s a work that also speaks of consumerist trends: since the colours change every season, every time the work is shown, a new range of colours is seen. It looks out of place in a gallery, but I feel people are excited by the pulse of sound and colour. It’s just like a painting to me.

Yes, this is from a series of towels that are embroidered with these sad/funny lines. The lines came from a script written by myself and writer Anthony Carew, titled, Me. Each line of dialogue was like a question or statement in the form of self-portraiture. There are hundreds of lines, and so for a number of these, I took to a bath towel as something in the morning that could be a mantra to your day. For example, another one is, ‘Is it depressing I spend more time wondering about what my cat is thinking than how to combat systems of oppression?’

I don’t consciously link them together, they just do when you put enough in a room. It goes back to following whatever interests you; if you stay true to that, themes automatically reveal. The amazing thing to learn with this survey is how works from 2000 to 2018 are so different yet discuss a similar subject. It's a massive self-portrait.

It is also the title to a photograph from 2006 that has a teenage boy talking to a psychologist. He is speaking, so I imaged this is what he is saying to a therapist. I feel the title is equal parts aspiration and desperation.

Perhaps, because often I am not critical of consumerist culture. I treat it as something in life, like a tree, it’s part of the landscape. It seemed strange to not mention or show the brands’ influence in our lives. As I type to you now, I see a Mac logo, a Fuji printer and Yamaha speakers – all within a meter. These things stay with us, and they change logos as we change clothes. They have Twitter accounts and people follow them.

How albums can now be streamed and altered afterwards, like a software update. Kanye did this with his last two. Whatever is released on launch day is different a month later, so you end up with these different versions and mixes. That’s a radical change from a life of purchased CDs and LPs. Second, I wonder how Instagram face filters will evolve. How far will we go with all the smoothing and eye-widening? They only change the ones not being used, so it’s the users that dictate what works, and they’re slowly pushed towards a new vision. Finally, it’s going to be interesting to see how the new Celine rollout goes with Hedi Slimane for 2019.