Brian Flynn

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As an Irish-Canadian artist, Brian Flynn continues to explore the layered terrain of social constructions, memory, and my family's ties to political resistance in Ireland. Using oil paint and photo-transfer, I recreate figures drawn from both my personal lineage and Ireland’s turbulent, politicized past.

Many of my subjects were involved during the Troubles, while others were directly affected by these agendas. Through layering, obscuring, and partial erasure, I investigate how identity is both protected and erased—a gesture echoing the strategies of resistance and self-preservation practiced under surveillance and threat.

This process becomes an act of remembrance and critique, where image and history are neither fully revealed nor entirely concealed. By blurring the boundaries between personal narrative and collective memory, my work confronts how histories are preserved, distorted, or silenced under political pressure. Each painting becomes a space where identity is simultaneously present and unstable, mirroring the complexity of lived experience in times of oppression.