Brendan Fernandes, Still Life
SOLD OUT
Brendan is returning to his past life as a dancer. His artworks and performances highlight the various meanings that the body contains. In the artists words “it is both a kind of object, endowed with cultural meaning, viewed by others and labored on by ourselves, and it is also our expressive active access onto the world, constitutive of [our] subjectivity and selfhood”. In this way, his new work continues to engage with the transitional nature of identity, while now exploring how this is enacted and experienced bodily.
Brendan’s project for I Heart Your Work was inspired by his live performance and installation entitled Still Move, in which dancers work with a rubber ball against a wall. The video becomes an organic landscape in which the rubber ball is at times seen as part of the body, and at other times revealed as distinct. Brendan used the opportunity Art Futures provided to explore a new medium. The organic, yet manipulated, solid, yet fragile forms of blown glass are placed on a rubber plinth, classical and formal in structure, yet soft and fleshy in appearance and texture. These small sculptures are compellingly beautiful and strangely familiar. With their swellings and orifices and fleshy tones, Brendan creates associations with the possibility of the human body to be both manipulated and innately expressive of an identity that is neither linear nor static. Still Life becomes a pivot point in Brendan’s career; a visual art object that marks a point of transition in Brendan’s practice into one that is increasingly focused on dance and performance. Still Life is the dancing body embodied.
Still Life was offered as a series of 8. Due to the handmade nature of the process, each Still Life within the series is very slightly different. The glass component stands on a rubber plinth, an unconventional and subversive material specifically chosen for its contrast to both the medium of glass and the solidity and authority of a standard plinth. The overall art object stands approximately 10” high.
About Brendan Fernandes
Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent, currently based in Chicago. His unique cultural background as a Kenyan-Indian-Canadian has informed him with a sense of the hybridity and transitional nature of identity. This compels his artistic practice, in which he continually questions authenticity and provenance with the idea that identity is not static, but enacted.
Brendan has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Art and Design New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Art in General, Mass MoCA, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Art Gallery of York University, Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Sculpture Center, Deutsche Guggenheim and the Stedelijk Museum. He was a finalist for Canada’s Sobey Art Award (2010), and was on the longlist in 2013 and 2015. He was a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship in 2014. In 2016 he will be artist in residence at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in the Department of dance Studies. For more about Brendan, check out his website at www.brendanfernandes.ca.
