“I am a visual artist who uses the law as medium, and a graphic designer that focuses on labor and economic rights.”
When Law Becomes Visual Material
Brian McSherry works at an unusual intersection of conceptual art, graphic design, digital processes, and legal thinking. Rather than treating law simply as a subject to illustrate, he approaches it as material: something made of language, images, procedures, categories, and systems of authority that can be rearranged inside an artwork. His academic background reflects the same movement across disciplines. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design, an MFA in Studio Art, and a JD in Law, bringing visual communication and legal structure into direct contact within his practice.
McSherry’s research extends across court cases and laws from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union. He also cites cultural hegemony, natural and moral rights, and psychoanalytic theory among the ideas informing his work. These references give him a vocabulary for examining labor, economic rights, ownership, and the mechanisms through which institutions define what can be used, copied, protected, or controlled. In his hands, the legal system becomes more than background information. Its wording, visual conventions, and claims to order become part of the artistic problem.
That problem is often expressed through a graphic language that moves between clarity and disruption. Clean grids, bold sans serif typography, editorial structures, and poster formats can be interrupted by pixelation, halftone textures, fragmented photographs, digital noise, distorted lettering, and hand drawn marks. Search interfaces, legal terminology, headlines, HTML language, and the appearance of public information can enter the compositions as recognizable structures, only to be displaced from their normal function. The work may initially resemble a document, advertisement, browser window, or campaign graphic, but its purpose has shifted from delivering information to questioning how information acquires authority.
Brian McSherry: Appropriation Under Examination
McSherry describes his visual lineage as a mixture of appropriation artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince with the graphic approaches of Stefan Sagmeister and David Carson. The combination is revealing. Appropriation brings questions of authorship, reuse, ownership, and context, while experimental graphic design gives him tools for controlling or destabilizing how words and images are read. Instead of keeping these histories separate, he places them into the same working space, where design can function critically and an existing image can become both evidence and material.
One work especially important to him is Two Princes, which emerged from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. McSherry used images associated with the dispute, including Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince and Andy Warhol’s screenprint, then processed them through TouchDesigner. He asked the software to redraw the two images as line drawings using the same measurements. What interested him was the striking difference between what the machine registered and what the human eye perceived, turning the process into a visual experiment around appropriation and the amount and substantiality of material being used.
The work does not simply illustrate a famous copyright case. It converts questions raised by the case into a procedure. Image becomes data, data becomes line, and comparison becomes part of the composition. The machine is not presented as a neutral answer to a legal problem; instead, its way of seeing exposes another layer of uncertainty. How much of an image remains when its form is translated? At what point does resemblance become transformation? McSherry uses the gap between computational reconstruction and human recognition to keep those questions visibly active rather than resolving them into a single statement.
Legibility, Obstruction, and the Politics of Access
A recurring tension in McSherry’s work lies between information that appears available and meaning that remains difficult to access. Words may be enlarged, rotated, fragmented, coded, or pushed toward partial illegibility. Photographs may be obscured by compression, pixel grids, graphic overlays, mismatched fragments, or interference. These strategies place pressure on the expectation that graphic design should always make communication easier. McSherry is interested in what happens when the tools of clarity are used to reveal confusion, exclusion, contradiction, or competing claims.
This tension is particularly relevant to his focus on labor and economic rights. Visual communication has long been part of union organizing, public campaigns, institutional messaging, and commercial persuasion, and his compositions draw on some of those traditions while refusing the certainty of a straightforward poster. Elements recalling activist graphics and mid century print culture can sit beside Pop Art, appropriation, internet aesthetics, and the damaged appearance of corrupted digital files. Familiar visual systems are enlarged, recolored, degraded, or reorganized until their authority becomes less stable and their construction becomes more visible.
Language itself is another important part of this inquiry. McSherry received a Fulbright Fellowship to study bilingual graphic design language laws, research he is interested in applying to the Irish language. He holds citizenship in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, while his legal and artistic research already moves among several national and regional systems. One of the projects he hopes to develop next is a new typographic system built around the history of the Irish language. The idea extends his existing concerns into typography, where questions of language policy, cultural continuity, public visibility, and design can meet within a single formal system.
Brian McSherry: Systems Still in Motion
Alongside his studio practice, McSherry works full time as a professor studying and teaching art and design. That position keeps making, research, and pedagogy closely connected. His practice depends on moving between fields that are often treated separately: legal analysis, graphic communication, visual art, digital experimentation, and questions of social or economic structure. The resulting work does not ask viewers to forget the original function of a court document, interface, headline, or reproduced image. It relies on that recognition, then alters the context around it.
His next planned projects expand the technological side of the practice. He is interested in developing interactive video art involving datamoshing, artificial intelligence, and fashion design. Each of those areas introduces a different kind of instability: the corruption and recombination of moving images, the interpretation and generation of material through machine systems, and the relationship between image, body, surface, and circulation. Rather than representing a departure from his current work, these interests offer additional ways to test how established visual structures can be redirected.
The typographic project connected to the Irish language moves in another direction, but with a related concern for systems that shape what can be seen and understood. It asks design to engage with history and language while his interactive work pushes toward rapidly changing digital tools. Between those projects sits the central tension that has driven much of McSherry’s practice so far: rules create structures, but structures are never experienced in a purely abstract way. They arrive through words, images, interfaces, reproductions, and design decisions. His work makes those delivery systems visible, then subjects them to the same scrutiny as the laws, rights, and institutions they carry.
