CIRCA 111 review

Calgary: Brian Flynn at Art Gallery Calgary

Brian Flynn: Cover Series: Belfast 1978, 2004, carpet underlay, 245 x 260 cm; Art Gallery Calgary.

All things Hibernian tend to be overly romanticized in North America, but any incidences of ‘Irish goggles’ when viewing Brian Flynn’s most recent body of work were likely encouraged by the Guinness served at the Canadian opening rather than the artist himself.

Flynn views the subjects of Cover Series - Belfast Portraits, his larger-than-life victims and aggressors from both communities involved in Ireland’s long-standing conflict, rendered in carpet underlay, with a human-scaled gaze rather than through the filter of any political agenda.

A peripatetic existence and Irish roots ferried Flynn between South Armagh and Canada throughout his childhood and adult life. His bi-cultural status informs and legitimizes this series, giving him the distance to see how troubled the Troubles look from an outside perspective, while granting him the familiarity not to succumb to proselytizing and the authority of direct personal experience rather than myth-mining. The work refuses any sort of moral commentary, standing as cultural exploration and documentation of Flynn’s immersion in Belfast while he obtained his Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. It also builds on the artist’s longstanding manipulations of unconventional materials and techniques.

Flynn began by photographing territorial murals near his Belfast studio. A serendipitous encounter in a home renovations shop provided a tactile introduction to carpet underlay, a material he had already clocked as being near-ubiquitous in dumpsters in the same communities, and it also reminded him, comically, of certain body-disposal methods in Hollywood gangster films.

Marrying the potentials of employing a mass-produced, everyday material which typically remains ‘hidden’ with hijacking publicly available images and using them as a vehicle for his own voice, Flynn amassed biographies on a number of faces he saw on murals and in related stories he found in newspaper and magazine archives, books, and the internet.

Flynn scanned his source material into a computer and isolated each face using Photoshop, creating transparencies that he projected onto typically rug-sized swaths of underlay. He chalked out the contours of the portrait before embarking on the tedious process of picking away the black rubber to reveal a face emerging from the beige backing underneath.

Although Flynn himself is aware of the history of all the occupants of his pieces, viewers are not given any context as to where the person ‘belongs’. No names or details of the subjects are provided, reducing them to strictly human terms and investigating whether we ever know who it is we are looking at, in any medium.

The pieces are possibly the antithesis of rug-hooking; anti-crafts that result from peeling away layers to expose a simple image behind a complicated idea and a multiplicity of meanings. As a quirk of material and process, the faces appear almost pixelated - exactly how the artist encountered in print media sources.

Canadian writer Christa O’Keefe knows art, but also knows what she likes; she finds the two frequently overlap.

Brian Flynn: Cover Series - Belfast Portraits, Art Gallery Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, through 20 March; traveling to Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada in April and the Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Co. Louth, Ireland in September.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.98–99

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