Dominic Byrne (NSW)

22 April – 13 May 2017

Subject Position: is the title of Sydney-based artist Dominic Byrne’s third solo exhibition. The exhibition develops on the artist's interest in modes of performance amidst current digital technologies, using the relation between visible, performing bodies and their viewer(s) as a framework for a series of sculptures, wall paintings and the exhibition's centrepiece - a multichannel video work entitled Alien vs. Predator.

Underpinning Subject Position: is an engagement with the internet's conflation of "social" and "antisocial" content - a Venn diagram where audition porn, "product engagement", alt-right politics, unboxing videos, Björk's stalker's video diaries, celebrity pranks on "Ellen", problematic fake followers and Vine stars intersect. There's certainly a point in the internet's recent history where all the mean-spirited trolling created by involuntary-celibates was rightly called out by people with actual lives and a lot of us are still coming to terms with that transition.

Subject Position: is accompanied with a piece of text by writer Tahlia Chloe.

Subject Position: project was assisted by a grant from Arts NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government and supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments. The program is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)

Dominic Byrne is a Sydney-based artist who uses both performance and studio-based models of art making to investigate the modes in which people constitute themselves and others online. Originating in video-based performance, their practice has recently begun to encompass minimalist inspired sculptures and wall paintings, linking online representations of desire and queerness within an aesthetic operated by its self-consciousness and physical reality.

Byrne has exhibited throughout Sydney and Australia, including group exhibitions at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, MOP Projects and Interlude Gallery as well as solo exhibitions at Fake Estate in association with Metro Arts, Brisbane and most recently at Firstdraft in Sydney. In 2016, Byrne graduated from the National Art School with 1st class Honours as well as undertaking the Onslow-Storrier Paris Residency for three months at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

Images by Christopher Arblaster.