Gerard Byrne
Towards a Gestalt Image - Loch Ness & Fact
Research ongoing since 2000 AD.
Image courtesy the artist.
Gerard Byrne
Towards a Gestalt Image - Loch Ness & Fact
Research ongoing since 2000 AD.
Image courtesy the artist.
So off we trotted one Saturday afternoon to Milton Keynes gallery, stopping off at Wetherspoons for a Wuwu on the way. Coined by some town-planning optimist as a “Boulevard”, MK gallery itself lies up a long stretch of desolated office sprawl, which bizarrely had something of the ambience of totalitarian Russian communist architecture. The gallery, and it’s curator I suspect, benefit from this anonymity of Milton Keynes, in a kind of opportunistic freedom and lack of competition, both of which cannot be bad for the gallery or it’s shows.
When he speaks about his work one would expect Gerard Byrne to be slightly cagey as to build suspense surrounding the presentation of 10 years of research into the Loch Ness legend. 10 years is a long time. However he appears relaxed, and beyond that, even excited to talk about the 10-year process he went through. A process, he describes, as a whittling down of the material, a selection process to sufficiently blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.
The exhibition opens with Byrne relating the growth lines of a tree, to the reported sightings of the monster throughout time. The viewer is then sufficiently primed for “truth”.
Following the didactic tree analysis is a film within a small projection space of a local man speaking about the local legend, in true scots dialect. On the other side of the tree lie three waist height museum display cabinets containing real copies of Loch Ness’s local newspapers with articles actually feigned by the publisher to increase sales during the 1800’s. Media manipulation is nothing new, albeit now existing on a massive scale. And there is almost an acceptance of it as being a form of someone else’s truth.
By the last room I was sufficiently primed and ready to lap up any lie the artist threw at me. We were then confronted with a room full of ambiguous photographs, which not only question themselves, but their own subject matter, construction and layout. The shapes and “subject matter” are ambiguous as they are oblique, merging into whatever you want them to be. Having understood the first parts of the exhibition, the last room leaves the viewer scrabbling to piece together some idea of the artists intentions, made even more pertinent by the feeling that even the Byrne himself didn’t know. As he gladly admits, it was a struggle and not once was ever sure it was worth it. Well we certainly enjoyed second-guessing ourselves around this exhibition and it proved to be well worth the visit.