Conor McGrady: Civil Abuse

Ratio 3 is pleased to present Conor McGrady: Civil Abuse, on view from November 21 to December 23, 2004.
Conor McGrady will show recent gouache drawings based on injuries and wounds inflicted by State forces and right wing gangs on individuals in Northern Ireland.
The imagery in the work is culled both from McGrady's own experiences and photo documentation of injuries often taken by the families and friends of the victims. Other drawings in the show refer directly to military and paramilitary forces preparing for operations, many of which are directed against civilian populations. These images refer not only to Northern Ireland, but also to Iraq and other situations where occupying armies leave their traces on the bodies of innocent civilians.
McGrady's drawings are an attempt to call attention to the physical manifestation of power through austere depictions of the injured and those preparing to inflict injuries. Within in the work, each wound represents how the State enforces its ideology by literally embedding itself physically in the bodies of those who attempt to resist it.

Conor McGrady was born in 1970 in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. He received a BA Honors First Class in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria,
Newcastle Upon Tyne, in the UK, in 1995. In 1998 he completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2000 and 2002 he was awarded a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant from the City of Chicago. Other awards include the Ragdale Foundation/Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Fellowship, and the Juror's Award in the '15th Evanston + Vicinity Biennial' at the Evanston Arts Center in Illinois.


McGrady has exhibited widely in the US, Ireland, and the UK. He was selected to participate in the 2002 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. In 2003 he completed a five-month residency in the Woolworth Building, New York, through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Studio Program. His work was included in Phantom Arch, White Columns, New York City (2003). He has had a solo exhibition Red Dot Gallery, New York City (2004), and will have a solo show at Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta (2005). McGrady currently lives and works in New York. This is his first solo exhibition on the West Coast.