Brendan Killian
The Bean Eater

Brendan Killian
With a few exceptions, the work in this exhibition was produced over the course of the last six years and coincides with a period of great transition, personally, and in turn, artistically.

The earlier work was produced prior to the spring of 1997. It is an exploration of my past, particularly of my early childhood, and an homage to my family. In the process of creating this body of work, I focused on those aspects of my familial experience that had the deepest effect on me, such as the influence of Catholicism, and developed a visual language to effectively convey my experience to the viewer.

The remaining work on display here, characterized by the sheep motif, is a sequel to the work that I had been doing up to this point and marks a departure instigate by the changes I experienced on a personal level.

Whereas my earlier work was much more literal in its interpretation of my subjects, I chose to address the same themes by employing a symbol; in this instance, a sheep.

In a general sense, the sheep serve as a visual metaphor to explore issues of sacrifice and spiritual transformation, not unlike their traditional role in Christian iconography. On a personal level, they embody a faith in the future and are meant as a response to my previous work which, in retrospect, depicts a struggle with fear, an essential point of departure for the transition in the artwork that followed.