Darren Sylvester

Darren Sylvester’s photographic and installation-based work transforms irony into sincerity, conflating commodity fetishism and ethereality in a way that recalls Jeff Koons’s well-honed aesthetic. The centerpiece here, from which the exhibition’s title is derived, is a more than ten-foot-wide photograph, Broken Model (all works 2016), which depicts a collapsed female model on a glittered stage, cared for by another model while three others stand in the background. Re-enacting a scene from Jean Paul Gaultier’s final womenswear show in Paris in 2014––where Canadian model Coco Rocha contrived a fainting spell––Sylvester exploits such theatrics to create a beauty-pageant version of a Renaissance tableau, at once touching and glamorously anemic. All five women appear again together in another large-scale photograph, Green Editorial, which shows them smiling straight into the camera with turquoise glitter-paint on their faces, referencing the joyous visages found in cosmetics advertisements.

In To Live––a sculptural installation of a catwalk covered with purple sand and an array of whole and halved coconuts made from bronze and porcelain––the clichéd images of tropical island life and the aspirational tone of high-end fashion become entwined, in a style that would not be out of place in a Louis Vuitton window display. Alluding to the artist’s recurrent use of modeling techniques, where scenes are re-created from everyday life and popular culture, the show avoids overt critique and wholeheartedly embraces artificiality and detachment to amplify uncertainty and polarize interpretation.