YOTA
Artist is residence, Roanoke City S.E.
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Welcome to
Studio Articulo
A work shope where Artists help Humans Confront Their Humanity
Brian Counihan
I am an Irish artist and educator located in Virginia.
My studio is part of ArtRatStudios which offers performance and event space for Avant-Garde events and performances.
Community. Ideas. Support. Often Absurd.
Apocryphal Texts
Alexander-Heath Gallery, Roanoke VA. 2020
A “Non-Career” Retrospective Exhibition.
Conceived as a student engagement project, students worked on all the artwork in this exhibition. The objective of this project was to inspire students to take risks and find the courage to make mistakes while learning & explore a variety of materials, media, and many approaches to art-making. The work is mine though, in which I reflect on major upheavals in my life and in our world .
Bellow are thumbnail images of each work.To view the work of this most recent more thoroughly click on the galley tab above.
Yellow Bus to Arles
Garden of Earthly Delights
Silicon Age Collapse
Virgin Migration
Rapture Cloth
Word Made Flesh
Innocent Until Proven Guilty
William King Center for Art & Culture. Abingdon, VA. 2013
These are life sized silverpoint portraits that were regenerated from thumbnail mugshots printed in “Crime Times”. Each subject had their mugshot taken upon arrest and, before they were convicted or exonerated their photos were published with their names and arrest citations. Silverpoint was used as a drawing medium n to draw Princes and Scholars, and I wanted to restore some dignity back to the subjects by using this medium. These works are not for sale but will be presented to the subjects of these portraits. In respect of their privacy I did not keep a record of the subjects names. Please contact me if you wish to claim one of these portraits.
Disorderly Conduct on Hospital Grounds
D.U.I.
Reckless
Violate Protective Orders Profane Threatening Language Over Public Airways
Felonious Assault/ Malicious Wounding Attempted or Display Firearm in Commision of Felony
Concealment Price Alter Merchandise
Driving With Suspended or Revoked Licence.
Probation Violation
Ordinance
Pepco Gallery, Washington D.C. 2011
Ten Years After: Artists Respond to the lingering effects of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The drawing “Augury” 30″ x 60″ is graphite on Rag Paper.,featuring a beer drinking “bird man” and a cowering “eggwoman”. “Ordinance” consist of ten “shells” made from shredded student essays mixed with wood glue, and cast in 2 litre soda bottles (which in itself is a kind of weapon). The “shells” are mounted on wooden vase stands sporting jockey markings and a cross at the head. They are uncomfortable and ambiguous objects for me : are they earplugs, weapons, sacred textual scrolls, game-pieces, specimen jars, reliquaries or cenotaphs?
Augury with Ordinance
Ordinance deployed
Jerusalem Shell
Jerusalem Cross
Greek Shell
Maltese Shell
Orthodox Shell
Star Shell
Augury
Paraphernalia of Pilgrimage
Olin Gallery, Roanoke College, Salem, VA. 2010
This work began as abstract paintings that celebrate painterly surfaces, vibrant colors and offered the aesthetic challenge of resolving long triptych compositions. They evolved, quite unintentionally, into narratives- some fractured and troubling while others evolved from memes and mythemes waddled into cryptic tales. The narrative is a hook, but the process (many canvases were painted over five or six times) was the real pilgrimage. The “history” of every painting underneath the painted surface both informs the image above but also creates an undertow of liminal spaces for the imagination to explore. Click for exhibition catalog.
Acteon
Sorry Route
Saturnalia
Daylillies
Oedipus
Tyger
Veiled Series
Lynwood Gallery, Piedmont Fine Arts Center, Martinsville, VA. 2009
These are a series of “Implied portraits ” painted in oil on canvas. 16″ x 20″ heads and 30″ x 40″ three quarter length veiled portraits.
My painting process could be described as “seeking” rather than “depicting”.
Initially, theses paintings were exercises in painterly mark-making. As they began to reach resolution each suggested a veiled head. I allow myself not to fully understand or conceive the thing and I seek a queasiness and uncertainty in my work because that is the place were we have the room to contemplate interesting questions. Do we want to view art that reflects ourselves back to us- or how it makes us feel about ourselves? Do we go through life seeing things outside ourselves or do we basically seek ourselves in others?
Weekdays
Absent
Mother and Child
Blue Tee
Yellow Tee
Friday
Transitions
Millstone Gallery, Fincastle, VA. 2005
When I moved to Virginia from Chicago in 1999, I was surprised by the number of people who took pride in their Irish ancencestary- a “Scot’s Irish” ancestary that celebrated a combination of Scots and Irish heritages relatively untroubled by Catholic and Protestant distinctions. I grew up in an Ireland where those distinctions were made painfully clear. These painting attempt to blur those received distinctions- fairy tales take a dark turn and mythologies crash, tumble and burn.