Brandon Poole
and beneath these clouds

From November 16, 2023 to January 20, 2024
Opening on November 16, 2023 at 6 pm
— Facebook event

On October 30th, 2014, at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport in Kansas, U.S., a Beechcraft King Air B200 lost power to its left engine shortly after take-off and crashed through the roof of the FlightSafety International Citation Learning Center, colliding with a flight simulator inside. Tragically, the pilot of the plane, two students, and their instructor in the simulator were all killed. For and beneath these clouds, Brandon Poole scans the details of this crash, examining forensic reports, studying aviation technology, and collecting news stories and online commentaries. Expanding and contextualizing his survey, the artist draws images from the corporate archive of Montréal-based flight simulation manufacturer Canadian Aviation Electronics (CAE). Looking less to solve the mystery or identify the cause, Poole attempts to excavate a metaphysics of error, inexplicability, and coincidence—the disappeared logic that challenges information’s authority.

Here, information ranges on a spectrum between story and data, truth and fragment. The image, for its part, registers as story, information, and data alike. Besides this enumeration, the artist places simulation and forensics. Poole’s appropriated collection of cloud photographs, Neither were nor are nor will be, entangle this cluster of ontologies. Considering these images served as reference photos in the modeling of digital clouds for CAE’s MAXVUE display generator, one wonders which version—real or simulated—outweighs the other. Possibly the most vaporous of subjects, clouds offer a metaphor for the infinity of factors and multi-causal logics that render truth or certitude a fluid target. 

Documenting the process of testing on the same model propeller blades as those of the plane that crashed into a flight simulator, the video work Nothing hoped for nor imagined enacts the forensic gaze as it searches for assurance. Poole zooms in, almost to the pixel, examining the traces and marks of dye penetrant on the propeller's surface. As the camera searches for focus in the glare of proximity, the image unmasks its own datalogical composition and thus the deflection that such detail presents. What evidence can truly assure? Whether evidence or artifacts of death and failure, in Everything that does not move the destroyed propellor blades, resurrected from forensic photographs and 3D scans, do not fill in enough blanks to constitute truth, let alone to make the event less tragic. Poole’s images and research also uncover a tension between the crash as a tragic, all-too-real event, and as a tragedy or narrative form. In this tension, the real either sobers such philosophical musings or propagates them. 

Brandon Poole is an artist and researcher based in Montréal. Having previously trained in journalism and philosophy, his research-based practice moves by way of interviews and fieldwork to examine the entwined histories and speculative futures of media, simulation, and the image. He received a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor of Fine Arts, from the University of Victoria, and is presently a PhD candidate at McGill’s School of Architecture (History and Theory). His work has been shown at Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC), the Toronto Biennial, the University of Toronto’s Art Museum, and Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver, BC).