GERARD BYRNE

Working primarily with lens-based media, Gerard Byrne explores the paradoxical relationship between time and image. Looking at both highbrow and popular media, from the art press to men’s magazines, museum displays to commercial radio stations, Byrne meticulously documents and reconstructs the cultural ephemera of the last century. With deadpan humour, his works draw attention to the ways in which text, sound and image produce and transmit meaning, and how shifting contexts render this meaning impermanent. In particular his works have looked at the legacy of Modernism, evolving attitudes towards sexuality, and the move from collective sources of entertainment to the more fragmented media culture of the 21st Century. Never succumbing to nostalgia, Byrne’s analysis of the recent past and its mythologies tells us just as much about the present – how, far from being inevitable, the moment we live in is just one of a number of possible outcomes, and how alternative futures can live on through cultural artefacts.