Monday 8 February 2016


Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre

I visited The Mead Gallery on Tuesday 2nd February 2016 to see an exhibition called:

Gerard Byrne:  1/125 of a second

Gerard Byrne is an Irish artist who is based in Dublin. He works mainly in film, video and photography.

The Biologiska Museet in Stockholm is a natural history museum  which houses a 30 metre high 360 degree panorama of the Nordic landscape and incorporates a variety of taxidermied animals and birds. The museum was built in 1893, and enabled people to experience the Nordic wilderness within the confines of a city and this was at a time when photography and moving images were still in their infancy. For this piece of work Byrne has made a film about the Muskeet which shows this amazing panorama with close up views of the predators and prey posed in frozen motion. The film's title is in a disappearing Nordic language and translates approximately as "Life within an image".
Also in the exhibition was a video work titled  Subject, a cast of actors playing the part of students in the sixties at the University of Leeds. The subject of the script ranges from drug-use and sexual behaviour to Ted Hughes poetry.

Another piece of video work by Byrne is titled  New Sexual Lifestyles and is a re-enactment of a debate between prominent figures of the sexual revolution which was published by Playboy magazine in 1973.
A peculiar aspect of this is that the participants in the film  have distinctly Irish accents and the setting for the film is in County Wicklow, Ireland, a country in which Playboy was banned in the seventies.

Byron's work has been described as "visually rich and intellectually complex" and  having seen this exhibition I think this is a suitable description. I thought that Life within an image is a very ingenious piece of video work but despite having lived through the sixties and seventies, Subject and New Sexual Lifestyles  have still left me puzzled about what is reality and what is artistic creativity.