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, Byrne’s 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.
Stacks On is an attempt to recreate the physical and masculine sociability of the act of ‘stacking on’ within the artist’s studio. In the short video, the artist’s body is rendered in an environment that is both acutely corporeal and simulated in its attempts to carry out a desire for physical contact. Comprised of 194 takes of the artist’s body running and then collapsing into the centre of the image of the green screen, Stacks On replicates the closed system of spectatorial desire between the artist’s performing body as both the subject of the image and its immediate viewer, rendering the body into a condensed state of self-flagellation bordering on violence and desire.
A BROKEN LINK 