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.
