Brian Cooney is an emerging multidisiplinary artist originally from Dublin now living in Sligo. He works through the mediums of photography (digital, analogue and alternative processes), sound, performance and text. He returned to study as a mature student and holds a B.A (Hons) Photography awarded by the University for the Creative Arts, London graduating in 2019 and an MFA (1st class honours) awarded by the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Most recently he was part of the group show Intangible Atmospheres (2023) at Solstice Art Centre, Navan Co. Meath. The exhibition gave form to a wide range of media. The works were an attempt to embody phenomena as experienced in Worlds continuously in flux.
Also in 2023 he participated in NCAD Works (2023) at NCAD.
In 2022 he was part of the survey exhibition Images Are All We Have (2022) the Print Works Dublin Castle, part of the 2022 PhotoIreland Festival which traced the
thematic development of the photographic discipline and contextualises the historical background, bringing together the diverse and socially engaged set of contemporary art practices that define Contemporary Irish Photography today.
In 2021 he was part of a group of artists collaborating on After the Century (2021)
which focuses on research conducted around The Short Century exhibition by
Okwui Enwezor. The presentation displays the multiplicity of African modernism in a mix of mediums and methods, echoing Enwezor’s approach in his 2001 and 2002 shows. Installed on the Return Gallery’s south wall (Goethe-Institut Irland), After the Century consists of collaged images, quotes, texts and other findings that emerge as the group’s mediation on The Short Century.
Also in 2021 Cooney was a contributor and collaborator to Not Bloody Likely (2021) A publication produced through a collaboration between Art in the Contemporary World (NCAD) and the National Gallery of Ireland.
His body of work No Place Like Home (2018) was exhibited as a solo show as part of the 2018 PhotoIreland Photofestival.
In 2019 he was awarded an Artist in Residence in a care setting in St. John’s Community hospital, Sligo.
In 2020 he was a recipient of the Artist Mentorship programme awarded by Leitrim County Council Arts office.
Also in 2020 he was awarded a place on the How to Flatten a Mountain artists residency, a joint initiative between Cow House Studios and the PhotoIreland Foundation.
His artwork is a critical enquiry into the social, political and cultural aspects of the landscape of rural Ireland as experienced as an everyday phenomena.
