Niall Brady

Niall Brady works in distortion. His practice in moving image and visual art is emotionally and technically obscured. More interested in feeling it than how it feels. His work is based on processing: images through fuzz, words behind grain, looped and layered. His practice is often personal but not specifically therapeutic; it’s selective. Niall’s work often explores and exploits the roughness and texture found in obsolete technologies—warmth, scan-lines, feedback, and glitches. The work will lose and find itself buried underneath as well as part of the imperfections in the recording. There’s a push and pull to honesty. Niall’s work is interested in how to feel comfort in revealing and committing. A change in pitch is a change in who the voice belongs to; vague descriptions of persons retain anonymity; faces without features become just a part of the screen. Niall’s work does not reject being personal, but the techniques create walls between viewer and artist. What results are fragments of the personal, then finding their way to be remade by the audience. Niall Brady’s work pulls from textures of music—the two seconds before the song starts, the repeated pitch, finding the obscure sample; online mysteries—lost users, suspicious websites, narratives with no clear ending; and corrupted video tapes—warped images, interference, and degradation. Meaning in Niall’s work is unstable and shaped by its imperfections, lingering between what it revealed and what remains obscured.