COMMAND & CONTROL
— Conor McGrady
5 September – December 2026
Work presented in Command & Control is from a series exploring the symbolic representation of power. Animals have always been used in warfare. Predators often appear as signifiers of state or military power, and horses and dogs in particular, have a long history of weaponisation. In a contemporary context, such animals are utilised in policing and the exercise of state control. Dogs, as dual signifiers of loyalty and threat, are also actively used to enforce state terror and deployed as instruments of torture. As such, these works are an attempt to question the continued proliferation of the language of force and the symbolic and actual exercise of social control.
Conor McGrady is an artist from the north of Ireland. He has exhibited internationally, with one-person exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta and Zagreb, Croatia. His first solo museum exhibition, Entering the Control Zone, took place at the Museum of Fine Art, Split, Croatia, 2021. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (Qalandiya International Biennale), Biennale of Contemporary Art, D-0 Ark Underground, Sarajevo-Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His writing has appeared in Ruminations on Violence (2007) State of Emergence (2011), State in Time (2012) and The Design of Frontier Spaces (2015). Dean of Academic Affairs at Burren College of Art he lives and works in the Burren, Ireland.