The Green Room Exhibitions – Brian Coney.

about

Gone the Way of the Three Ladies opens with a single frame: three women walking along Venice Beach, their presence both grounding and impossible to pin down. From this scene, the series unfolds as a meditation on quiet power and fleeting connection—not just the pauses between moments, but the unseen currents they stir.

Each photograph is its own quiet event: a figure suspended mid-air above a trapeze; a lone man standing on a rooftop at sunset, staring into the void; someone unknowingly mirroring a swan pedal boat as the city rises behind them. These are glimpses of distance and intimacy, held in the space between the known and the unknowable.

Shot by Brian Coney across California and middle England, the series expands into seventeen images. A man sits motionless on a park bench, draped in a white sheet, his sandaled feet the only trace of the person beneath. The fabric clings and billows, turning him into something between a spectre and a statue. Elsewhere, a camper van rolls down the motorway, its roof perfectly level with the cooling towers behind it, an accidental mirage of escape and industry. These moments, neither posed nor accidental, ripple with the strange friction of getting by—lives passing, gestures unfinished, and presence caught just before it leaves.

These moments, neither posed nor accidental, ripple with the strange friction of getting by—lives passing, gestures unfinished, and presence caught just before it leaves.

Artist Bio

Brian Coney (b. 1987, Co. Tyrone) is a Belfast-based writer, musician and photographer. His work drifts between music, text and image—a middling little space where culture, place and memory queue up, forget why they’re there, then leave. His background in music journalism and publishing shapes a practice built on close listening, curiousity and a deep commitment to independent and underground culture.

A founding editor of The Thin Air, one of Ireland’s leading independent music and culture publications, Coney has spent a decade covering sound, art and cultural scenes. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Quietus, Jacobin, Rolling Stone, and The Wire, with interviews including Yoko Ono, Michael Stipe, Sinéad O’Connor, John Carpenter, Pixies, Steve Albini, and David Lynch—the latter of whom helped tilt him more toward photography. His conversation with Ono was later prominently featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on the artist.

Though he has increasingly lugged a camera around in recent years, his debut exhibition Gone the Way of the Three Ladies marks a shift toward trusting his eye and the instinct to document. His work skulks in the charged space between presence and disappearance—unguarded expression, fleeting gestures and the weight of absence.

As a musician, he is a member of the NI Music Prize-winning band Junk Drawer and releases experimental organ compositions as Vein of Earth. He has also been a long- time DJ and recovering promoter, bringing acts like Slint, Damo Suzuki, Mclusky and Quasi to Belfast while hosting nights, showcases and music industry panels.

While probably diagnosably obsessed with Philip Glass and coloured noise in equal measure, he credits most of his inspiration to the much finer talents of friends and associates who haunt the Black Box. To quote Stevie Lennox: “Up the Peace Process.”