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Darren Sylvester
‘Party up on Skull Rock’
Brunswick
1 Aug.–30 Aug.
2025

Neon Parc is thrilled to present ‘Party up on Skull Rock’, a solo exhibition of new work by Darren Sylvester, opening at Neon Parc Brunswick on Friday 1 August, 6–8pm.

In his latest body of work, Darren Sylvester mines the highly stylised surfaces of contemporary life—its promises, poses, and emotional mechanisms—with a glossy precision that evokes the effects of pop music videos and high-end advertising—where emotion is engineered, not felt. Comprising four large-scale photographs, two ‘lightspeed’ paintings, and a suite of sculptures, the exhibition continues Sylvester’s exploration of pop-cultural mysticism and the thin veils of desire, artifice, and identity.

At the heart of this exhibition lies a fascination with the idea of the mirage—the illusory and unattainable. Through an oversized magic wand, a trick retractable knife cast in bronze and steel, and a sterling silver rocket rolled into a joint, Sylvester conjures the visual language of enchantment—objects designed to channel power, invoke awe, or offer escape. Yet these works mislead as much as they promise. Like stage props in a magician’s act, they hint at revelation but remain inert, ungraspable. Transformation here is never guaranteed—it’s a trick of the light, a gesture of mis-direction, where desire is real, but the magic is always out of reach.

In his new photographs, Sylvester riffs on the imagery of perfume campaigns—where enticing vessels and sensuous vapours sell an idea of self-altering fantasy through glossy seduction. His subjects are often fixed in a stillness that suggests detachment, ennui, or longing—emotional undercurrents disguised beneath immaculate surfaces. In ‘Spilt Potion’ (2025), a woman straddles an oversized perfume bottle, caught mid-transmutation in a neon-lit set that feels part sci-fi, part stage dream. She is powerful and poised, occupying a synthetic world built from branding, beauty, and corporate aesthetics.

Meanwhile, ‘Party up on Skull Rock’ (2025) depicts a surreal moment of euphoric, yet ghostly abandon as dissected figures dance atop a massive, cracked skull, headlights blazing from hollow eyes, conjuring a final bacchanal—a rave-at-the-end-of-the-world. It’s an image of exuberant nihilism, joy against oblivion. Like the oversized magic wand, it’s not about the spell but the longing behind it: to break through, to feel changed, to feel anything at all.

Sylvester’s new paintings, ‘Turbo Maxx’ and ‘Maxx Drive’ (2025), painted with the iconography of lightspeed—a sci-fi technology that allows instantaneous travel through time and space—bridge these scenes and objects together. Here, speed becomes metaphor: the rush of emotion, the flash of fantasy, the dopamine hit of instant gratification.
Darren Sylvester’s new exhibition constructs a theatre of yearning, where every object is a promise half-kept and every image a mirror of our own elusive desires. Here the viewer is caught between spectacle and sincerity, as these new works trace a contemporary mythology of transformation—one not of transcendence, but of flickering attempts, false starts, and fleeting illusions. It is a world of artificial light and simulated sincerity that shines just for you, but only if you believe it’s real.

Exhibitions (6)
Biography Darren Sylvester

Darren Sylvester works across a wide range of disciplines, including photography, sculpture, music and installation, embedded with commercial pop cultural reference tinged with ennui. In his large-scale photographs, which resemble luxury commercial photography, he co-opts the language of consumer aspirations. Various references including film, fashion, pop music videos, consumerism and capitalism come together in works that maintain a disquieting balance between the convincingly real and strangely artificial. The scenes in each photograph are constructed with laborious intensity, ultimately becoming frozen narratives (a plane flying into a clouded sunset; a crouching basketball player; models become pirates) with enigmatic and ambiguous poignancy. His work wryly merges low consumerism with high art, broadening the intersection between the commonplace, branded desires and glorified opulence.

In 2019 his work was the subject of a major survey exhibition and monograph at NGV Australia, titled ‘Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something’. Selected recent group exhibitions include ‘Namedropping’, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2024); ‘Maria Kozic x Darren Sylvester’, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2023); the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: ‘Free/State’, (2022); and ‘The National’ at Carriageworks, NSW (2021).

Darren Sylvester’s work is held extensively in public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne; Artbank, Australia; Macquarie Bank Collection, Australia; Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Perth; Daniel & Danielle Besen Collection, Melbourne; and Sir Elton John Collection, London; in addition to significant private collections internationally throughout the United States, China, Holland, Switzerland, Singapore and Japan.