Gerard Byrne has been having a busy time of it lately. His exhibitions schedule has included a solo in Green on Red and participation in The Way Things Turn Out at IMMA, writes Aidan Dunne

The piece he showed there, a short film called Why it's time for Imperial . . . Again, has also received a very good response at the international exhibition Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt. Now the Limerick City Gallery has assembled a good survey of his work to date, incorporating a representative range of photographic projects and the Imperial film

Byrne was born in Dublin in 1969, and attended NCAD. He went on to do a masters in fine art at the New School for Social Research in New York and, spanning 1997-1998, he was in New York again, on the PS1 resident Studio Programme. From there he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is known primarily as an artist who works with photography, and it is worth pointing out that he is a very good photographer. He is a photographer, though, who continually interrogates the medium, his own responses to and use of it and our relationship with it.

The earliest work included in the Limerick show forms part of a series of images of anonymously functional spaces by night. In shot after shot we see details of the kind of bland office or retail interiors that are familiar to just about everyone. As spaces they are, as Byrne puts it, "in varying ways transitional - between work days, under construction, between owners, ambiguous".

Byrne relates the images to a passing of the era in which "two imminently outmoded technologies", architecture and photography, "the ancient arts of inscribing and describing space", combine symbiotically "in the production of space in modernity". It's interesting that he refers to them as being both "arts" and "technologies", when neither is a technology per se. Both absorb and apply technologies, and it seems that what he has in mind is the end of a technological and cultural era.

The work from his recent Green on Red show is beautifully installed in the City Gallery's fine South Gallery. His point is presumably to deflect our attention from what each picture is a photograph of and onto how the image and our reading of it are structured.

So, rather than encountering a linear narrative, we find ourselves jumping from one thing to another with no obvious connection. It is only as we work our way through the whole body of work that we get a sense of several interconnected themes.

One of them is the Loch Ness sequence in which mundane, but extremely good, images of the Loch are juxtaposed with newspaper accounts of sightings of the monster. The monster is what we look for but cannot see in the photographs. You could say, variously, that there is always something that you cannot see in a photograph, or something more than we can see, or less than we imagine. Byrne also explores the idea of what photographs don't tell us in a recreation of one of the renowned Bechers' industrial archaeological photographs of the Guinness Brewery. The image of industry is set against one of opulence in the form of a view of one of the Guinness estates, at Luggala in the Wicklow Mountains.

The hidden dimensions of landscape are further treated in views of sites named in the Flood Tribunal as possibly being associated with irregularities in the planning process. Views of the set for a theatrical production of Twelve Angry Men suggest that photography is a fiction complicitly accepted as truth. The idea of authenticity is quizzed in a view of the reconstruction of Archers Garage, wrongly demolished and ordered to be rebuilt.

Byrne stalks art students in one of their natural habitats, caught in the act of drawing at the Natural History Museum in Dublin. In these images we step through another trap-door of meaning. His subject is the students, who are drawing something authentically natural - wild animals - that have been converted into artefacts by taxidermists and are arranged within what is itself an artefact, the carefully preserved museum display. Byrne clearly relishes the hall of mirrors that a photograph can easily become and his film continues his interest in meaning.

The source for Imperial is a 1980 National Geographic magazine ad for a new luxury Chrysler. The ad took the form of a conversation between Frank Sinatra and company chairman Lee Iacocca. Byrne took this strange "conversation" and, with film-makers Siofra Campbell and Michael McDonough, gave it a Brechtian re-working. The result is an odd, ambulatory conversation about cars between two guys in suits. But the characterisation, the acting, the film technique and the run-down urban settings work against the references to the consumerist dream projected in the original copy.

It actually suggests something like The Sopranos or one of those much imitated sequences by Quentin Tarantino in which protagonists have incongruous conversations about the relative merits of McDonalds and Burger King while killing people. The appeal of the project for Byrne is clear. Its layers of references and potential meanings are right up his street, from the hubristic Imperial of the car's title to Sinatra's iconographic status, which combines the sheen of the American dream with accounts of underworld associations.

Byrne shows every sign of being as adept with the moving image as with the still. Incidentally, for some reason, this kind of generous survey of a young artist's work has been the exception rather than the rule in Ireland, and City Gallery director Mike Fitzpatrick is to be commended for it.