Dylan Marriott
REMEMBER THE DARKNESS
Gallery Notturno, 259 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne
23 June - 27 July 2024
Wake up, put on pants and catch the tram into the city. At the intersection of Elizabeth and Lonsdale street, cross over. Keep walking. You will see a brown dog near the entrance to the Emporium. It will have a cataract in its left eye and you will notice that it’s glowing. Before you reach the dog, take a hard right. Look both ways and cross the road again. You will find yourself in front of an eyewear store. Pause and enter. The store will be empty and you are to wait here until a man of small stature comes out to greet you. You will say you are here for the show and he will direct you to the back of the shop. He is busy — do not make small talk and waste his time. Thank him for assisting you and take the narrow flight of stairs up to the second floor. Once you reach the correct level, turn left. Walk towards the room at the end of the hallway; you will pass two removalists extracting ‘My Bed’ (1998). You will let them pass before continuing. The real estate agent will be waiting in the bedroom for you. Her name is Tracey Emin. Greet her. She is busy — do not make small talk and waste her time. Once inside, take photos like you’re at a house inspection. Please only approach Tracey if you have more than one question. Do not ask about: the paint job, the insulation, the building's integrity, the energy efficiency of the lights, the art show or the previous owner.
Running above street level of Elizabeth Street in Naarm/Melbourne, idle spaces form a crust of geriatric, urban grottos. It’s dead winter and at number 259, a former Victorian dwelling, a collection of oneiric photographic prints diffuse themselves throughout three spaces. In the first room, presumably the former bedroom, a single mattress is splayed below a window and a huge panoptic eyeball lies on the ground beside it, like a demented night light. Coarse white paint wilts off the walls and retired optic trinkets deteriorate in boxes and disposable bags; the scene is disarmingly intimate.
Here, in the upper storage rooms of Melbourne Optic Center, Gallery Notturno offers us its first off-site show. Composed of six photographic prints and one charcoal drawing, Dylan Marriott's solo exhibition REMEMBER THE DARKNESS, manipulates colour and tonality with a cataractous scattering and muting of light. The exhibition borrows its title from an interview with American photographer, William Eggleston, as he ‘reflects on his photographic dreams, wishing he could bring these images into his waking life.1’ The activation of the space, as the exhibition text explains, requires a participational combing of each room to find and view the artworks. In a congruence of space and subject, we see objects of domesticity in a domestic interior. Both the show's curation and subject matter seem to mutually appreciate this domesticity as a sacrosanct act of banality worth exposing.
Without electrical power, the show relies entirely on natural light; each print is illuminated with whatever the opaque windows can afford. In a moment of biblicality, a shaft of late afternoon light finds Stairway through an elevated window. The small print hangs on the back wall of the narrow middle room — perhaps the old study. Tied shopping bags, binders, paint and turps sag into a polyethylene nest on the floor below. An eyesight testing box crouches in the corner. Looking at the dark panelled striping of Stairway, I think of a ribcage. I think of ultrasonography, x-rays images and their capacity of seeing within and throughout the body. I think of holding light to my palm and it glowing through with the embryonic red of blood and tissue. I think of a literal staircase railing and how it restrains and looks pretty, then of the architecture of a home and how it goes beyond the material and spatial limits of its walls.
REMEMBER THE DARKNESS primarily employs C-Type prints; a method of exposing an image onto photographic paper using either LEDs or lasers. Being afforded the luxury of digital precision, the images have the effect of sliding over their edges. Across the hall, we find Untitled, the photographic negative of a tap and outdoor pump. Two pipes bend on either side of the pump’s metal torso straddling a stone making it look anthropomorphic. The tap's head looks off to the right, caught off guard in a moment of candidness — a portrait of two figures side by side in the dark.
Interacting with everyday objects in an exhibition context makes us reconsider their importance and sacredness. REMEMBER THE DARKNESS reminds us that observation is consonant with the interruptive-cum-revelatory force of defamiliarisation. To see something again — in all its particularity — requires the disorientation that arises when the familiar appears before us as temporarily unrecognisable2. Marriott looks through the camera’s viewfinder eyepiece and rotates us again and again.
In the front room, the centre table bloats under piles of old frames; they look gaunt and cheap without their lenses. Red Chandelier’s is the most exposed and saturated print of the show. Its abstractism is alluring and conversation starting; other visitors around me hypothesise about what it might be. With its low-angle perspective, I look up into the vintage store chandelier and see the hubcap of a wheel — a virus and the underbelly of an umbrella. The deep, siren red colour of the print — also seen in Red Painting — is gory and erotic. I see echoes of Eggleston's 1973 print untitled (greenwood mississippi) gifted to Big Star for their Radio City (1974) album cover — rock‘n’roll never looked so good.3
Stretched to a length of 3.4m to my right, Charcoal Drawing runs up the wall and across the ceiling like a comically large, photographic negative. The roll has come out black, perhaps being exposed to too much light. This feels like irony on Marriott’s behalf, considering that the overall exposure of REMEMBER THE DARKNESS is low at best. Without an overt subject matter, I focus on the tiny lacerations on the paper; the white spaces falling through bear evidence of a hand in motion, sweeping across its surface. The charcoal shading on the photographic backdrop replicates the texture of worn black denim — I stand opposite it in my own tired jeans. I think about stone washing and the abrasions left on the garment — the friction of breaking something and putting it back together again. The wall behind the drawing looks beautiful and sage in its decay.
Marriott’s REMEMBER THE DARKNESS is ruled by the partial or total absence of light — both space and print adhere to the structural and compositional demarcations of shadow — an allegory for what the dark preserves and endures. Yet after I've walked the third floor dust down the street, the nostalgia locked within the title remember is what stays with me most. The space, like REMEMBER THE DARKNESS, is only materialised through memory.
- [1] Dylan Marriott, REMEMBER THE DARKNESS 2024 exhibition page, Dither Australia
- [2]Channon Schmitt, Refamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky (2018)
- [3] Andria Lisle, William Eggleston: King of the Album Cover (2010)