Drop
Brían Crotty
Main Gallery
21 January - 13 February 2027
Opening Reception Thursday 21 January 2027, 5.30–7.30pm featuring live performance ‘Grief', performed by Rosie O’Regan
‘Drop’ is a solo exhibition by Brían Crotty that brings together painting, moving image, and performance as part of his ongoing practice-based PhD research at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design.
Crotty’s research asks how hybrid methods across painting, cinema and generative AI can position the oneiric imagination as a visual methodology for producing novel, affective artworks. In the exhibition, painting dialogues with film, memory, dream logic, and generative image-making. Images move between material and computational processes, becoming altered through repetition, misrecognition, editing, projection and repainting. The exhibition takes its title from Crotty’s film Drop, a 33-minute single-channel moving-image work first presented as part of Cork International Film Festival in 2024. The film combines live-action cinema, performance and generative imagery, moving through fragmented scenes of memory, grief and psychological uncertainty. Rather than following a conventional narrative structure, the work develops through atmosphere, repetition and interruption.
The paintings presented alongside the film extend these concerns into a material register. Figures, interiors, landscapes, and fragments of remembered imagery occupy unstable spaces where the familiar is slightly displaced. Across the exhibition, Crotty explores the threshold between recognition and uncertainty, and the moment when an image appears to contain a narrative while simultaneously resisting closure. The opening reception will also include the live performance Grief, performed by Rosie O’Regan. Originally developed in relation to Drop, the performance extends the exhibition’s investigation of grief, memory, and embodiment from the screen into the gallery’s physical space. Its inclusion on opening night further moves between painting, cinema and the live body, reinforcing the exhibition’s emphasis on images and experiences that move between forms rather than remaining contained within a single medium. ‘Drop’ forms part of Crotty’s wider doctoral enquiry into the oneiric imagination as a method of artistic production. Rather than treating the dreamlike as a visual style, the research considers oneiric processes such as displacement, repetition, temporal instability, condensation and ambiguity as practical methods through which artworks can be generated and transformed.
“My work begins with painting, but increasingly develops through exchanges between painting, cinema, memory and generative image-making. I am interested in the way images change as they move between forms. A memory may become a written fragment, a prompt, a generated image, a painting or a film sequence before returning again to painting. At each stage something is lost, misread or transformed. I am drawn to these moments of slippage because they can produce images that feel familiar but remain difficult to fully resolve. My current practice is informed by the oneiric imagination. I do not use the term oneiric simply to describe work that looks dreamlike. Instead, I approach it as a method based on dream-associated processes: displacement, condensation, repetition, unstable time, and resistance to narrative closure. Painting remains central because of its physicality, duration and capacity for revision. Film introduces time, sound and sequence, while generative technologies introduce further instability through misrecognition and unexpected associations. I use these differences productively, allowing one medium to disturb or redirect another. Grief, memory, Irish cultural experience and inherited imagery recur throughout the work, but I am less interested in illustrating these subjects than in creating conditions in which they can remain unresolved. I want the work to occupy a threshold where an image appears accessible and resistant at the same time. Drop brings these concerns together through painting, moving image and performance. The exhibition is conceived as a space in which images circulate between different states, allowing meaning to emerge gradually rather than through a fixed narrative.”
Brían Crotty is a visual artist, filmmaker, lecturer and practice-based PhD researcher working across painting, moving image, performance and generative technologies. He is currently Assistant Lecturer in Fine Art at South East Technological University and is completing a practice-based PhD in Fine Art at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. His doctoral research investigates how hybrid methods across painting, cinema and generative AI can position the oneiric imagination as a visual methodology for contemporary art practice. Crotty holds a Master of Fine Art from University of the Arts London, Wimbledon College of Art, and a BA in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited and screened in Ireland and internationally. Recent presentations include a solo exhibition at the Linenhall Arts Centre and the screening of Drop as part of Cork International Film Festival at St Peter’s, Cork. Previous exhibitions and screenings include MART Gallery, Dublin; Rubicon Gallery, Brussels; Dupont Underground, Washington D.C.; Eastern Edge Gallery, Newfoundland; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Cork Film Festival; Triskel Christchurch, Cork; and Crawford Art Gallery. He is a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award and a Cork County Council Arts Bursary Award. His practice brings together painting, cinema, memory and emerging technologies, with a particular interest in grief, cultural inheritance, dream logic and the instability of images.