Growing up, Brendan George Ko moved around a lot, adapting to a new place, its culture, landscape, textures and accents, then eventually moving to another to call home. Each prior place eventually became dream-like in Ko's memory—and, like most dreams—would fade deep in his mind. If it was not for his mother's scrapbooks, filled with her stories, photographs, small illustrations and postcards found along the way, major details of his childhood would have been forgotten. It was in those photographs he was able to remember—in minute detail—specific events, family vacations, places they visited and lived. Those scrapbooks inspired Ko to start making his own—each year for the past decade—for the sake of memory keeping so that in the years to come—the people he shared this decade with can revisit them and suddenly remember what they had forgotten.
you start dying the day you’re born (excerpt) fills the walls with poems from Ko's scrapbooks and over 1,000 loose prints—often as small as a hand—scattered in clusters of portraits, landscapes, textures and some poetically-connected, sharing similar moods and colours—while others are specific to a place or time.
Brendan George Ko is a visual storyteller who 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. Ko holds a 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. Ko is a regular contributor of the New York Times and has worked for The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, Patagonia, Apple, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Flux Magazine, Hana Hou, Jacquemus, SSENSE.
