Elizaveta Suldina on The Uncanny Clouds by Brendan O’Callaghan

There is a moment, just before a storm breaks, when the air thickens and time seems to stretch. It is this liminal state — this tremulous suspension between stillness and rupture — that Brendan O’Callaghan’s The Uncanny Clouds evokes. In this collection of work, the sky is not merely a static backdrop, but the exhibition’s universal protagonist; the clouds portrayed not as fleeting accumulations of vapour, but as vast, suspended forms that hover at the edge of the known — looming monuments to that which cannot be grasped.

The title of the exhibition gestures toward this friction, as a sense of the uncanny — that which is at once familiar and estranged — permeates the eerie, affective scenes. O’Callaghan’s landscapes are not exactly surreal, but tilt the real into something alien. With skies tinted in fluorescent green or blood red and shadows blooming in places where light should fall, they become sites of ontological suspension. The more concrete elements of the terrain, recalling the landscape of Western Canada, become surreal when bathed in the spectral glow of the looming forms above. What emerges is a mutated, chimeric landscape — recognizable in form, but not the logic. It is in this dissonance that the uncanny takes root, as the viewer is drawn into scenes that feel both distant and familiar, like dissipating memories or dreams too vivid to be dismissed.

Within these works, the uncanny becomes not only the core theme but a mode of encounter. O’Callaghan’s clouds are not metaphors in the usual sense — they do not attempt to suggest symbolic forms or point toward something else, but rather themselves represent that "something else." Rendered in dense, painterly layers, the canvases vibrate with a tension that never quite resolves. Stormscapes resemble monuments, whirlpools, bruises, rising smoke, creases and fractures, as their forms seem to radiate and swell rather than drift, yet they remain monuments to nothing fixed — to feeling, to half-remembering, to almost-recognition.

The viewer, too, is implicated in the uncertainty of these scenes. With little accompanying text, encountered in the white space of the gallery, the canvases assert an enigmatic, looming presence that seems to stretch out beyond their modest frames. Where is the “I” in these images? Dispersed in both time and place — never quite “there.” Within these vacant scenes, the viewer himself becomes a body amid pressure: surrounded, diminished, vulnerable before the immensity of the vaporous masses. The landscapes enact a sort of uncanny account — where depictions of place no longer affirm presence but disrupt and unravel it. And yet, within this flux lies a peculiar intimacy: O’Callaghan’s clouds do not depict sublime cataclysms or grand celestial events, but rather mirror internal weather, not towering over the viewer so much as enveloping them.

Here, the imagery of the cloud begins to expand beyond established symbols. In depictions of landscape, clouds often serve as instruments of delay and indeterminacy — they withhold and obscure, suggesting the presence of something just beyond perception, on the verge of arrival or disappearance. Yet in O’Callaghan’s paintings, the clouds are not simply suggestive of an unseen force, but themselves assert a gravity so total that the foregrounded landscape beneath becomes secondary and static.

O’Callaghan’s use of oil paint furthers this sense of suspended becoming. Thick, translucent layers of near-monochromatic pigment give the cloudscapes a sculptural presence, as the looming forms seem at once grave and ephemeral. This interplay between materiality and transience creates a sense of stillness that is uncanny in itself. These works do not depict transformation but dwell within it — they are transitional spaces, saturated with the emotional residue of searching, questioning, and becoming. Each scene is suspended in the uncertainty of whether it reveals a moment of rupture or ascension. Yet despite the pressing atmosphere, there is no explicit threat, no spectacle of erupting disaster — only the low, droning hum of suspense, the muffled pitch of something just beyond the audible range.

Each painting holds a critical turning point — depicted not through action, but through suggestion. These are not didactic images; they do not explain or narrate, but rather keep us in tension, directing our attention toward what remains withheld. The paintings resist closure, inviting a form of viewing that is slow, recursive and affective. Areas of visual stillness give way to densities that resist parsing, as the eye moves across the canvas only to return to the same unresolved areas. Their meanings shift with the gaze, their edges blur and colours fracture. If there is a narrative thread emerging throughout the exhibition, it is one of transition — not from one place to another, but between states of knowing, between perception and recollection, between presence and absence.

The landscapes of The Uncanny Clouds occupy a liminal space where boundaries between the internal and external begin to collapse — a memoryscape conjured not through narrative, but the distillation of atmosphere. The viewer is never shown any event itself, but instead drawn into the sensation of not quite remembering, of spectating someone else’s memory. What these paintings present is a space of vulnerability, resisting spectacle in favour of tension, inviting interpretation while withholding resolution. One encounters these sites in a state of transition: not made for the viewer's gaze, yet devoid of any internal human presence. The viewer is left exposed, caught in a peculiar anonymity. The cloudscapes become sites of compressed time — not omens of what’s to come, nor relics of what has passed, but manifestations of that which is foreign, fragmented, or absent. The paintings dwell in the space between recognition and revelation, between fear and awe, between grounding and flux. What these works offer is not a conclusion, but a landscape taking shape — something forming that has not yet revealed itself.

Elizaveta Suldina is a Calgary-based visual artist, currently pursuing Illustration with a minor in Comics Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts. Her work frequently combines various processes, techniques and influences, merging traditional media — including ink, watercolour, acrylic, and gouache — with digital tools, to achieve a synthesis of classic and contemporary methods. Likewise, the artist's interests extend beyond illustration to encompass writing, curatorial practice, the study of art history and aesthetic theory. Working primarily with landscape, Elizaveta's practice reflects a deep interest in the complexities of the subjects of place, home, memory, and belonging, shaped in part by her experience as an immigrant artist. Her works often examine the interaction between individuals and their environments, navigating the spaces between the built and natural, the internal and external, connection and isolation.

Instagram: @elizaveta_suldina

Visit the archive page for Brendan O’Callaghan’s The Uncanny Clouds here: Brendan O'Callaghan - The Uncanny Clouds