Report: Dark Night Gallery Show NYC

Our reporter stepped into the decidedly Lynch-ian visual world - part of the Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse musical milieu - on July 15 at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in NYC.

By A.D. Amorosi

Dark Night of the Soul, the audio/visual collaboration from Danger Mouse, David Lynch and the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse has had one tough mean labor before its eventual birth: legal wrangling with the Mouse and EMI; a subsequent DNOTS book of Lynch images with a blank CD-R and a download code; the suicides of Linkous and another of its vocal participants, Vic Chesnutt.

Not only did you never think Dark Night of the Soul would ever come out. You weren't so sure it should get released.

Yet when the Mouse/Lynch/Linkous project came out on July 13 (reviewed here) - a noirish synthetic set of dreamy melodies with singers such as Gruff Rhys, Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega and Flaming Lips - its most auspicious element, Lynch's images, got their own unveiling with a private exhibit of photography at the Morrison Hotel Gallery at Bowery and Bleecker in Manhattan. 50+ original images were displayed as DNOTS played in the background.

The Morrison Hotel - the neighboring gallery of John Varvatos' clothing store takeover of CBGB  - is not usually regarded as a high, fine art space per se. Instead, it usually lends itself to album cover art exhibitions or rare rock photo events. "That's exactly why we wanted to do this," says Peter Blachley, one of the Morrison Hotel gallery's owners and founders. "Certainly, it's tied in to the music. (EMI, the project's label, involved the gallery rather than David Lynch.) But this is not our usual show. We want to prove to audiences that we're not just classic rock; not just Rolling Stone cover art or lost photos of Jimi Hendrix as great as those things are. Showing a David Lynch project is perfect for what we hope to achieve in the future"

Lynch's photographs for the DNOTS project were decidedly Lynchian. Grouped in sets of four (and three in some cases), each is supposed to correspond to tracks throughout the album. Backgrounds of evergreen-ing lawns, rugs and Astro-turf hold the evidence of blood lust and dice-filled vice. Kitsch beach-combing photos of early-‘60s crinoline-wearing bouffant-having lovelies at a barbecue include a stranger in their midst; a flame-headed reveler. Sepia-toned photos of Munch-like screams, unmade bedrooms, solitary guns and toy baby lambs at attention are amongst the most unsettling shadow images.

As you pass each set, the other thing more disquieting than the images is the softly elegiac music that blows like a hot wind through the exhibition.

 The Dark Night Of The Soul exhibition is currently showing at the Morrison Hotel Gallery. Go to the gallery's official website for details, where you can also view a number of the Lynch photographs.