Brendan George Ko

Brendan George Ko, Nightly Visitor, 2020

Brendan George Ko (B.1986, Toronto, ON) is a document-based storyteller raised in Ontario, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawai'i, and is now based in Toronto and Maui.

Ko received his BFA in photography from Ontario College of Art & Design in 2010, and completed a Masters in Visual Arts at the University of Toronto in 2014. Here his practice shifted further into video and sound under the guidance of Kim Tomczak. Ko has shown his work locally and internationally including solos with Angell Gallery, Toronto; Contact Gallery, Toronto; LE Gallery, Toronto and group shows with Frogner Stasjon, Oslo; Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn; Birch Contemporary, Toronto; Camden Image Gallery, London. Ko has been the recipient of numerous awards including Contact Festival Portfolio Award(2017), Magenta Flash Forward Finalist (2018), Red Hook Lab’s New Artist Finalist (2018).

He is also included within several collections including TD Bank and BMO Financial Group. In addition he has been commissioned to produce work for the New York Times, New Yorker, Vogue, Bloomberg Businessweek, Patagonia, Walrus.


SELECT Exhibitions

  • The Haunted Landscape: Chapter One, Patel Brown, Toronto, ON, 2024

  • The forest is Wired for Wisdom, Contact Photo Festival, public installation across Canada, 2022

  • Monarch Butterflies, Reflective Memories, Patel Brown, Toronto, ON, 2022

  • Scrapbook, The Earth Issue Exhibition, London, 2021

  • Scrapbook, Person/Persona, ARS Gallery, Honolulu, Hawai’i

  • Scrapbook, Radial Survey, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, 2019

I see every photograph I take as a document; a document of a memory, a document of a person; a time and place, a feeling and a trace (of something that once was, something worth remembering).
— Brendan George ko