Brian R Donnelly
Goin’ Down The Road is an ongoing project that seeks to navigate the city of Toronto using popular films to propel the narrative forward. Relying on films’ inherent unfaithfulness to geography, a few dialogue cues, and a great deal of coincidence, scenes from disparate films intersect and redirect each other to follow geographic patterns rather than their individual stories. Compositing closely cropped professional footage over wide-angle, contemporary video allows for the emergence of a disjointed document that captures the growth of a city over several decades; distilling a small amount of truth from a growing library of fiction.
Released in iterations, Goin’ Down The Road occasionally changes direction as the research broadens and new material is added. This is the third iteration of the project.
Brian R Donnelly (b. 1979) is a visual artist based in Toronto. Holding a BFA in Painting from OCADU, Donnelly’s work centres around themes of identity and its distortion. Exhibiting internationally since 2007, he began experimenting with and presenting video-based work in 2017.