Midnight Grotesques

With Midnight Grotesques, US-based artist Michelle Lynn Dyrness and Australian writer Tristan Foster have collaborated across time and space to create a catalog of elusive objects unearthed from somewhere between memory and imagination. The resulting pages play on ideas of provenance and the uncertainty of a narrative truth. Like a pair of bandits in the dark searching for treasure Dyrness and Foster have created a record of the ghostly echo of lived experience. But who can tell if this is a record of items from a Palaeolithic past, a fractured present or somewhere in a distant, mysterious future? Midnight Grotesques plays with the idea of a museum collection containing strange, unidentifiable items, their provenance unknowable, thus, increasing their potency. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide what associations these “grotesques” provoke.

Michelle Lynn Dyrness is an artist based in California. Her work explores methods of making using accident, intuition and suggestive imagery revealed in the unexpected. She has exhibited extensively and her work has appeared in publications by Overground Underground magazine, The Blasted Tree, and Princeton Architectural Press, among others.

Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of two books: Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father and 926 Years, co-written with Kyle Coma-Thompson.