Sightings in the dark

The truth is out there…at ViewPoint Gallery. (Photo supplied)

Ella Morton speaks with ghosts. Her photo exhibit, Sightings, is an exploration of the human urge to reach into the dark. “It’s about people’s rapport with the unknown,” she says.

Morton is a Vancouver-based artist who uses photography as a tool for investigation. Manipulating light and movement in her art, she creates an atmospheric experience in all of her photographs. In Sightings, Ella shot with a homemade pinhole camera and colour photo paper in order to create a feeling of vagueness similar to the multitudes of UFO-sighting photographs that litter the Internet. Morton further disturbs the image by exposing the paper to select patterns of light and shadow, creating images that blur the line between fact and fabrication. Morton creates alien encounters that are not the least bit campy; rather, they are nothing but shadows in the blue and green hued sky.

Alongside her ethereal work, Morton plays a series of recorded ghost stories. The stories are strikingly intimate, told overtop a background murmur—like being told something special by a stranger at a party. One of the stories is told by Morton’s own father and uncle: a fiction they created themselves to pass the time. It sounds as if they’ve begun to believe it themselves. As Morton says, “people need to make up these stories,” whether it be through word or film.

The atmosphere at the ViewPoint Gallery is well suited for Morton’s showcase. Divided by a hanging wall, the room is split between features and the gallery’s usual works. Through the combination of the pale blue photographs and the mesmerizing audio collage, that half-room begins to feel denser than its size suggests. Though there is only a small hanging wall separating the two sides of the room, Sightings is private and personal—almost as if it were the other half’s shadow. Morton’s world becomes more suggestive the longer you stay, hinting at some secret truths behind the veil of the world. Morton, with true artist insight, says, “as you become more open to the world it becomes undeniable that there must be more to the banality of day-to-day life.”

Sightings is on display until Sept. 30 at Halifax ViewPoint (1272 Barrington St.).