Our Future Was Ours
Darren Sylvester
2005 | light-jet photographic print | edition 1/6
accession number 689
purchased by the Art Board 2006 - Murdoch University Art Collection

Darren SYLVESTER

born 1974, Sydney, New South Wales
lives and works, Melbourne, Victoria

Sylvester has exhibited extensively since the late 1990’s from group shows in artists-run spaces to solo shows. He has exhibited both within Australia and internationally and his work is held by high profile public museums and art galleries including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Darren Sylvester’s highly staged cinematic style photographs examine western consumer culture and the emotional residue of our expectations and dreams. Heavily narrative in content, these images have an ambiguity which urges an engagement and interpretation reflective of our personal experience.

Artist statement:

Our Future Was Ours is a strange mix of intimacy and anonymity. We see a library of students studying, with a title that speaks of their future and past.

The idea was to transform this time of their lives – studying – into a metaphysical statement, a truism, about life and living.

That being, that they all have fast-food packaging surrounding them. When you're at university, you often have the part-time fast food job. Often when you leave university, this job remains with you, for some people, working in places like these become their lives. They dream of a future after schooling, however often that future never arrives.

By showing the interaction between people and objects of popular culture – in this case junk-food – I want to explore the way often banal products can deeply affect our lives.

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