Brenda Pelkey: Haunts

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Formerly a documentary photographer whose visual subject matter was people, Brenda Pelkey turned in 1994 to a category of subject matter that manifests itself spatially, as psychic landscape. The photo-textual Memento Mori series incorporates cryptic text fragments that hint at tragedy, an implication advanced by different means in the subsequent works. Memento Mori and the panoramic, mirror-reversed compositions were photographed near Havre Boucher, Nova Scotia, a former home place that Pelkey revisited in 2000. Jenkner draws analogies between Pelkey’s depopulated twilit scenes and the aesthetics of film melodrama.