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Brendan George Ko | The Haunted Landscape: chapter one | 28 march - 11 may 2024
Let us see or hear the ghost, let it become visible or audible to others besides ourselves; paint us that vagueness, mould into shape that darkness, modulate into chords that silence – tell us the character and history of those vague beings ... set to work boldly or cunningly. What do we obtain? A picture, a piece of music, a story; but the ghost is gone.
– Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)
Language fails us, often. Its limiting nature sets boundaries that stifle attempts at sharing felt experiences and sensations. And so there is a challenge in being bound to language to translate a body of work that casts exactly that as its primary subject: a feeling. Many will know it well. It is referred to as the uncanny, the enchanted, a haunting, the sublime; often, for lack of better words, it has been said to send a shiver down the spine or to make hair stand on its end. It is an absence so potent that it is present.
There is no one set place, or way, or reason that this feeling arises, but certain things or settings do seem to be stickier than others, accumulating layer upon layer of stories, myths, memories, and encounters. Brendan George Ko explores this stickiness in this first chapter of The Haunted Landscape, comprising a collection of images taken during a recent trip to the Four Corners, a region surrounding the quadripoint where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. Desert valleys, hoodoos, and sandstone monoliths physically define the area; yet, it is an accumulation of histories that shapes its emotional landscape.
Home to Indigenous peoples such as the Navajo for millennia, the Four Corners region has been chronicled as one thick with memory, enchantment, and the unexplainable. History clings to this ancient landscape, signalling itself to the contemporary witness as a sensation of eeriness or transcendence. Ko harnesses this ineffable quality in his photographs through the disappearing light of a sun just set or the distant haze of high-noon heat. The traces of human activity sharpens their truancy, inducing a foreboding itch that can't be scratched.
There is a personal resonance to this landscape for Ko, who lived in this high desert region during his transition from childhood into early adolescence. The land and its stories – those of ghosts, shapeshifters, and strange encounters – had a lasting effect on his approach to observance; always seeking through his images to induce the supernatural quality of reality and highlight the ineffable feeling of his subject, whether it be a landscape, an object, or a person. Ko, here, uses that gift of observance to look at the accumulation, both of the place and his own past.
In her writings on the supernatural in art, Violet Paget, better known by her pseudonym Vernon Lee, charts the artist’s powerlessness in their pursuit of capturing a ghost. Yet, though art and language fail us time and again, we persist in our attempts, stirred by what seems to be a simple desire to share. To share in the experiences, beauties, mysteries that at once make us feel insignificant and so wholly alive. And so, The Haunted Landscape turns to a patchwork of images, sound, and language to share in and welcome the unknown that walks with us.
– Kate Kolberg
Formally, Brendan George Ko is a visual storyteller that works in photography, video, installation, text, and sound. His work is about conveying a sense of experience through storytelling and describes the image as supplementary to the story it represents. In 2010, Ko received his BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design where he majored in photography, and in addition he practiced sculpture and curation. During his time in the Masters in Visual Arts programme at the University of Toronto his practice shifted into video and sound with the guidance of Kim Tomczak. Ko’s work has been included in such events as The Magenta Foundation’s annual photography exhibition and publication, Flash Forward, the juried exhibition Hey! Hot Shot by Jen Bekman in New York City, and in numerous auctions such as ACT’s Snap! Live Auction, Buddies in Bad Times' Art Attack Auction, and Youthline’s Line Art Auction. In addition he has been commissioned by The Hospital for Sickkids and the Harbourfront Centre.
Kate Kolberg is a writer and editor based in Montreal. Her writing about art has been featured by C Magazine, PHILE Magazine, Peripheral Review, Public Parking, Franz Kaka, Towards Gallery, Xpace CC, The Table, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and more. She was the co-founder and curator of SIBLING (Little Sister) from 2017 to 2020.