Brendan Fernandes is one of the artists in Whisper Or Shout: Artists in the Social Sphere
March 17-May 1, 2016 • 10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Gallery at BRIC House, Brooklyn
From Hiz Hands, 2010.
About:
In Touch, 2015 (performance)
Dance is more than a heady research interest for Brendan Fernandes—it’s embodied in his muscle memory. The New York–based artist of Kenyan-Indian-Canadian descent trained in classical and modern techniques, earning a dual undergraduate degree in dance and visual art. Over the past several years, his work has explored questions of identity, translation, labor, and movement vocabulary through performances and installations that often utilize hired dancers. In a 2013 performance called Night Shift, developed for Toronto’s dusk-to-dawn Nuit Blanche event, dancers shredded gold paper and moved it around a space. The work obliquely referenced the inauguration performance of King Louis XIV. For The Working Move, a 2012 performance that will be restaged this month at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Fernandes orchestrates a fictional casting call for dancers, where pedestals and plinths are used interchangeably by the performers in pas de deux sequences.
Move in Place III, 2015.
Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from the University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at the Soloman R. Guggenheim, Bergen Kunsthall, Stedelijk Museum, Sculpture Centre, Manif d’Art: The Quebec City Biennial, The Third Guanghou Triennial and the Western New York Biennial through the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Fernandes has been awarded many highly regarded residencies around the world, including the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space (2008), Swing Space (2009) and Process Space (2014) programs. He has also received invitations to the Gyeonggi Creation Centre at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea (2009) and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011).
seeing, 2014.
Stand in leg, 2014.
The Working Move, 2012.
Fernandes was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s pre-eminent award for contemporary art (2010), and was on the longlist for the 2013 and 2015 awards. A national tour of his work organized by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery continues to travel Canada into 2016, and includes exhibitions at Rodman Hall, Brock University, The Varley Art Gallery, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery – Vancouver. He is currently a participant in “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” organized by The Seattle Art Museum (2015) that is touring to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, LA and will travel to the Brooklyn Museum, NY. He is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship (2014) and in 2016 he will be artist in residence at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in the Department of Dance Studies.