Butler Gallery is very pleased to present CROP, a film by Blaise Smith R.H.A., with music by Myles O’Reilly, which will play in our Digital Gallery.

“My film CROP is an abstract, meditative piece that continuously evolves a mix of moving images and sound. It focuses on the farmland of Kilkenny, portraying human cultivation as a form of “nature.” As a painter, I originally intended using the footage for static paintings, but the movement added something essential.

Although the resulting film appears to be “normal” it is actually very unusual: it is playing from a computer where software is making automated choices about the order and duration of each shot, ensuring no two viewers experience the same film. It does not really loop, because it leaves out some shots; the music is also being chosen randomly and is sometimes muted.

In theory the film could play infinitely without repeating the order or combination of shots, editing itself perpetually, reshuffling the 52 shots*.

This random system reminds me of a Japanese garden I once saw, where dripping water caused a few bamboo canes to tip over at different times, creating an arrhythmic music, in a continuously changing pattern. In a similar way, once set in motion, the film constantly changes, never repeating but juxtaposing different shots in new combinations.

I’ve always been interested in abstract paintings that also resolve into figurative images, and this film’s “cinematography” is an extension of that interest. Aerial photography and satellite imagery, particularly from a straight-down perspective, has this quality. When drones became available, I started exploring my local landscape from above, and I liked how the field patterns, tracks and literally colour fields resemble abstract paintings.

Paintings in modern life are meditative spaces on the wall. On the other hand, I think that the preoccupation with narrative in film has narrowed the creative possibilities. For me, a large screen is a fabulous opportunity to make something akin to a large painting. Anything can happen up there.” Blaise Smith R.H.A.

Blaise Smith R.H.A. lives in County Kilkenny and is one of Ireland’s leading Figurative painters. In a wide ranging career Smith has painted Landscapes, Portraits and Still Life, documenting the world around him: the haphazard reality of rural farmyard construction alongside the lyrical beauty of a simple cooking pot to a portrait of a school and its students. He has exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland in the landscape exhibition Shaping Ireland and his portrait “My Parents” was runner up in the National Gallery’s Zurich Portrait Prize in 2019. He has been working with video and digital media in one way or another since he was a teenager but CROP is his first moving image work to be exhibited in a Gallery.

Myles O’Reilly was born in Dublin and is an Irish musician and filmmaker. He is known for his unique and creative approach to music and film, blending elements of folk and traditional music with modern soundscapes and experimental visuals. O’Reilly composed the music for CROP and has kindly given permission to use the album Midland Loops for Sleepy Hedgerows which is available on Bandcamp.

As a musician, O’Reilly has released several compositional-ambient albums and has collaborated with many other artists in the Irish music scene, most notably achieving great success with Rónán Ó Snodaigh of Kíla. He is particularly interested in the ambient genre and is committed to minimalism, where simplicity and restraint guide his compositions. His minimal ambient approach is characterized by a deep emotional resonance, evoking a range of feelings from introspection and calmness to a sense of awe and wonder.

O’Reilly will be performing in the 2025 Kilkenny Arts Festival.

*FUN FACT: The number of possible ways to order a pack of 52 cards is ’52!’ (“52 factorial”) which means multiplying 52 by 51 by 50… all the way down to 1. The number you get at the end is 8×10^67 (8 with 67 zeros after it), essentially meaning that a randomly shuffled deck has never been seen before and will never be seen again. So if every person on earth shuffles one deck of cards each second, for the age of the Universe, there will be a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion chance of two decks matching.