curatorial info

Gerard Byrne

• Bio: Irish, b. Dublin, 1969; lives in Dublin

Irish artist Gerard Byrne has recently gained international recognition for his large-scale photography, film and video work, and theatre-based installations that explore the ambiguity of the past. Byrne reconsiders the ideologies of a not-so-bygone era, emphasizing the ways in which convention and representation are cultural constructions. Like his contemporary Jeremy Deller, Byrne tests the efficacy of the recent past against the present, placing the viewer in a middle-ground between fact and fiction, nature and artifice, documentation and experience, play and spectacle, just-then and now.

A country road, a tree, evening: Cruagh, on the road between Kilakee and Tibradden, Dublin Mountains is part of a series in which each photograph takes its cue from the title, drawn from the opening scene of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. Each image of A country road, a tree, evening depicts forested roadsides in Ireland or France known to be visited by Beckett before he wrote the play. In this series, fiction bleeds into fact and the present is repurposed as the past. Byrne illuminates each tree with colored lighting, challenging the distinction between nature and theatre. These photographs destabilize viewers, leaving them to construct history, truth, and reality for themselves.