Brandon Poole is an artist, filmmaker, and PhD Candidate at McGill University’s School of Architecture, where he is a Vadasz Scholar and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. With a background in journalism and philosophy, his practice and research examines the entwined histories and speculative futures of architecture, simulation, and the image, while his films document the folkloric and vernacular constructions of place. He holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours, with Distinction) from the University of Victoria. His work has been exhibited at Dazibao (Montreal), the Toronto Biennial, the Art Museum (University of Toronto), Polygon Gallery  (Vancouver), and Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC). His films have screened at EXiS (Seoul), Mimesis (US), non_syntax (Tokyo/Taipei), Antimatter (Victoria), Suspaustus Laikas (Vilnius), and Iowa City Docs, among others. He is a Lecturer in the Visual Arts department at the University of Victoria. For more information, please contact.

Unless the Eye Catch Fire, 2025
13:50min, 4K with sound

On October 24th, 2018, in Belliveau Cove, Nova Scotia, an eagle fell from the sky into the back of a man’s pickup truck. Within a week, the man, his dog, and the eagle all died. Returning to the sites of the events, the deaths are diffracted through the memories of the man’s sister, over the well in the basement of their family home, and between the pine-slatted walls of the eagle rehabilitation centre. 

Produced by Julian Dime

Screenings:
Iowa City Docs, (US) 2025
Mimesis Documentary Festival, (US) 2025
East_East Festival; non_Syntax (Tokyo) 2025
ULTRAcinema (Mexico) 2025
Ermitage_308 (Montreal) 2026
IMAGES (Toronto) 2026

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and beneath these clouds, 2023
Solo Exhibition @ Dazibao (Montreal)

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, crashing through the roof of the FlightSafety International Citation Learning Center and colliding with a flight simulator inside. Searching the punctiform event for its significance, the exhibition presents the causal indeterminacy at the story’s core as enigmatic exemplar; condensing, minutely, the accident’s forensic and informational excess with a desire for immersion, narrative, and meaning.

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One through the other, 2022 + Essay by Kate WhitewaySolo Exhibtion, San Sheng Art Space (Toronto)

The horizontally inverted image of an instagram influencer holding a 2009 Mark Lewis Venice Biennale catalogue is set opposite an essentialized replica of the catalogue, similarly inverted, resting against a mirror. 

The work was shown as the inaugral site specific exhibtion for a hybrid luxury fashion showroom/art gallery. The instagram image was sourced from San Sheng’s promotional campaign. 

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Islands, 2022 + Catalogue Essay by Nadim Samman & Dehlia Hannah
16mm film + HD Video + Kinetic Sculpture + Plinth + Stools 

“Infinitely changeable, full of evanescent marble-patterned gradations, varying in every ripple, the fineness of its composition an everlasting joy to the eye. Let us try and analyze it.”  


From the astronomer Marcel Minnaert’s popular 1950s text on meteorological optics, we find an intimacy of description evidence an aesthetic of scientific inquiry. Indeed, Minnaert’s empirical poetics would be cited by the computer scientist Dr. Nelson Max as an important technical reference in the creation of his 1981 Carla’s Island, widely considered the first computer-generated animation of water. Ray traced by a supercomputer at a nuclear weapons research laboratory during a summer of anti-nuclear weapons protests, Carla’s Island would go on to influence the representation of liquid in fluid-mechanics, military simulations, cinema, and video games; floating—in its algorithmic attempt at verisimilitude—the promise of a simulated world to inhabit and control.

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Cygnus, 2022
6:22 min 4k video with sound

A networked planet; an improvised signal; the last swan. Filmed on the northern shores of Lake Ontario, amid the ruined utopic architecture of Ontario Place, Cygnus takes the geodesic-domed Cinesphere (the first permanent installation of IMAX), a sunken lake freighter turned breakwater, and an invasive mute swan as subjects of its tripartite cosmic zoom.

Collected and Distributed by VTape (2023)

Screenings:
Suspaustus Laikus, (Vilnius Lithuania) 2023
Brussels Independent Film Festival (Belgium) 2023
Ghent International Short Film Festival, Belgium) 2023
Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria BC) 2022
non-syntax Experimental Image Festival (Taiwan) 2022

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