Brian R Donnelly is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto whose practice spans painting, video, and installation. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from OCAD University, Donnelly has exhibited internationally since 2007. His works often grapple with identity, distortion, and perception, exploring how reality can be refracted through layers of fiction, memory, and representation. Since 2017, he has expanded his practice into moving image, combining his background in painting with cinematic and archival methods to create complex narrative forms.
Over the years, Donnelly has developed a reputation for reimagining familiar subjects through a fractured lens. Whether in portraits, installations, or experimental videos, he confronts audiences with images that feel both recognizable and destabilized, inviting them to reconsider what is “true” in an age where fiction and documentation constantly overlap.
His awarded project, Goin’ Down The Road, epitomizes this approach. The short film reimagines Toronto by layering fragments of popular cinema, archival footage, and contemporary wide-angle video. It reconstructs the city not as a single narrative but as a palimpsest: a place where cultural memory, cinematic echoes, and present-day realities collide.
The film is at once a portrait and a deconstruction. By assembling scenes that don’t quite fit together—disjointed geography, conflicting timelines, fractured dialogues—Donnelly captures Toronto as both real and fictional, coherent yet elusive. In doing so, he suggests that a city is never a stable entity; it is always an evolving montage of stories, images, and contradictions.
Chosen by audiences for the Audience Choice Award, Goin’ Down The Road demonstrates the resonance of Donnelly’s practice with the public. While experimental in form, the film strikes a deeply familiar chord for viewers who recognize in it the layered experience of urban life.
This recognition affirms Donnelly’s role as an artist who not only deconstructs visual language but also re-engages audiences with the shifting identities of place and memory.
