In the 1997 film The Castle, the obvious-talking young narrator named Dale Kerrigan has a totalising faith in the promise of shared, familial love. Even the threat of potential house demolition, the material site of this ‘togetherness’, merely commits him further to the promise. Yet we only know this promise once it flickers; once it passes to unreliability. For Dale, this happens at two precise moments when he surveys his family sharing tender points in time. As if short-circuited, the wholesome scenes are dramatically cut in the film. Instead of warm fuzzies, all Dale can think about is his brother, Wayne, who’s lying in prison for armed robbery (‘He got caught up with the wrong crowd—he didn’t mean to rob the petrol station! Now he’s sorry.’). Dale is learning a lesson: not only can promises be compromised, but the potency of the promise is never clearer than in its moment of frustration. Suddenly, watching Hey Hey It’s Saturday with one’s family becomes existentially desperate: it won’t last, it can’t be shared, someone is missing out, life can’t be everything you want it to be, and, even if it is (again, unlikely), it’s only fleetingly so.

This moment—the anticipation of promises fulfilled against the fact of life as it stands—is the stuff of pop and consumer culture: hip hop songs, sitcoms, toothpaste ads, televised sport, luxury brands, ‘wellness’ culture. The promise itself isn’t too important—love, wealth, beauty, youth, truth, power, sovereignty, revolution, freedom, social acceptance, human connection—but more so the persistence of the expectation. In a more meta guise, it’s the ‘promise of the promise’ that is relentlessly and earnestly reiterated in artist Darren Sylvester’s staged, sleek, albeit semi B-grade photographs, installations, pop songs and readymade sculptures. Walking into his survey show Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something at the National Gallery of Victoria Australia feels like wandering into a poised shopping showroom, with all works initially pointing at you. In a collection as equally shaped by Marcel Duchamp as Bryan Ferry, Sylvester’s art offers not merely promises and their complications, but how we know promises through their complication.