Green On Red Gallery is very proud to announce Breathing in the Dark, Oisín Tozer’s first solo exhibition in the gallery as a result of seeing his graduation exhibition in TUD, Grangegorman, D. 7, in 2023 and following his work since.

Breathing in the Dark is a new, site-responsive body of work, consisting of large-scale imagery and a series of sculptural interventions. The artworks respond to the vacant patch of Spencer Dock land beside the gallery.  Taking this wasteland site as a starting point for a broader engagement with light, materiality and time he considers our relationship with nature, even in the once-more-industrial heart of the city.

The exhibition features a new large carved image of the invasive weed Buddleia. Buddleia’s history is addressed through the conceptual device of carving, pointing to the plant’s entanglement with human activity.

Other artworks address Buddleia’s ecological impact — specifically howits shadow suppresses the growth of neighbouring plants.  The plant’s ” fascist ” growth at the expense of the lifeforms surrounding it reflects the artist’s interest in French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose writings rethink fascism as something which occurs across time and even species. *  This is further referenced by the exhibitions title, taken from the opening lyrics of Little Dark Age by MGMT, a song which is an oblique commentary on the rise of fascist ideology. By drawing a parallel between this and the behaviour of the plant, the artist contradicts ideas of nature as something pure, stable or separate from human culture.

The influence of thinkers Deleuze and Guattari was also detectable in Tozer’s degree show Nascent Network ( 2023 ), in which the rhizome is directly traceable to his interest in the writings of these two philosophers, acting as ” a foil and an antidote ” to a previous more linear way of thinking.

While in conversation with Dr. Mark Gary in The Lab, 20 Mar 2026, Tozer further cites Félix Guattari’s “ three ecologies ” as an influence. The artist’s interest in presenting the viewer with multiple forms of time speaks to Guattari’s critique of capitalism as being  “ intoxicated with and anaesthetized by a collective feeling of pseudoeternity ”.

Time is present in Tozer’s work throughout. Elements grow, decay, play on a loop or are activated by passing sunlight.

A sleek matte screen is suspended from the ceiling like a pendulum, with footage of the shadow of a Buddleia plant. The image is obscured by light-sensitive chlorophyll reminding us of photosynthesis and the slow transformation of light into matter.

Breathing in the Dark also brings us back in time, referencing moments in art history such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s approaches to site and non-site and their conditions, to Derek Jarman’s provocation that film is a magical medium that turns light into matter. **

Together, the works in Breathing in the Dark form a constellation ofmaterials and gestures that speak to the beauty of the natural world while gesturing to the darkness of our current ecological moment.

*  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia  (1980), by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

A Thousand Plateaus is politically and terminologically provocative and is intended as a work of schizoanalysis, but focuses more on what could be considered systematic, environmental and spatial philosophy, often dealing with the natural world, popular culture, measurements and mathematics.

**  A Provisional  Theory of Nonsites (1968) by Robert Smithson

The  Nonsite (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this three dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus The Nonsite. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn’t look like a picture.

See link : https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/provisional-theory-nonsites

Oisín will be in conversation with Niamh Darling, Assistant Curator, Irish Pavilion, 2026 Venice Biennale and 2024 Provost’s Fellow in Curating. Details to be announced.