b r í a n c r o t t y
Brían Crotty is a visual artist, filmmaker and practice-based researcher working across painting, cinema, performance and installation. His practice examines how dreaming, memory and cultural experience are reconstructed through images, with particular attention to grief, trauma, care and the psychological dimensions of place.
His work is informed by the oneiric imagination, understood not as a dreamlike style, but as a visual methodology based on fragmentation, displacement, repetition and temporal instability. Images move between painting, film, sound and performance without being resolved into a single narrative. This allows recollection, rural landscape and inherited cultural memory to remain emotionally precise while resisting complete explanation.
Crotty describes his recent practice as post-AI. Generative artificial intelligence is neither treated as an autonomous author nor accepted as a neutral creative tool. Instead, its outputs enter a longer material and critical process of selection, rejection, redrawing, painting, editing and temporal disruption. The generated image is approached as unstable material whose errors, biases and misrecognitions can expose the limits and assumptions of computational image-making.
Painting plays a central role in slowing and complicating these images. Projected forms are altered through drawing, transparent washes, oil paint, masking, erasure and exposed canvas. The resulting surfaces retain traces of competing image systems, allowing digital immediacy to encounter physical duration, uncertainty and embodied decision-making.
This post-AI position does not claim that artistic intervention resolves the ethical problems of generative systems. It asks instead whether an artist can work critically from within those contradictions, using slippage, material resistance and sustained attention to challenge the apparent completeness of machine-generated images.
Crotty is an Assistant Lecturer in Fine Art at South East Technological University and is completing a practice-based PhD at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design.