Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present the Gallery’s first exhibition with BRENDAN FERNANDES, Within Reach. The exhibition will run from 30 November 2023 through 27 January 2024, and will be closed for the holiday break 24 December 2023 reopening 2 January 2024. An opening reception for the artist will be held Thursday 30 November 2023 from 6 to 8 PM with performances scheduled for the afternoons of Saturday 2 December 2023 and 20 January 2024 from 2:30 to 4:30 PM.
Contemporary dancers will engage and activate a series of sculptures created by Fernandes that are inspired by West African headrests. Designed to preserve and protect intricate hairstyles during sleep, the headrests also carry cultural and spiritual significance as they were believed to invoke vivid dreams and guard against nightmares. That connection to the spiritual and ethereal is communicated in the dancer’s movements. Reaching back to his early involvement in the NYC club scene, Fernandes choreographs a series of movements riffing off the highly stylized house dance known as voguing. Dancers strike a series of angular poses, bodies lying horizontal across the sculpture while arms extend vertically towards the sky in an act of spiritual solidarity. By responding to these African-inspired artifacts in the language of contemporary Western dance, the gallery becomes an activated space of multicultural hybridity and conversation. Born in Nairobi to parents of Kenyan and Indian descent, and later immigrating to Canada, the artist’s multifaceted identity influences his expansive practice. Through a language of interdisciplinary media, Fernandes composes a layered narrative that critiques and dismantles colonial contexts.
Within Reach further explores and animates the artist’s 2015 photographic project, also on view, As One. Originally created as a video commission for the Seattle Art Museum and later as a photographic series using the Cravens Collection at the UB Art Galleries, Fernandes choreographs the interaction of his dancers with the Museum’s collection of West African masks. The dancers act out a series of bows and curtsies traditionally known as a Révérence. Performed at the end of a class, a Révérence honors the efforts of both teacher and pianist. Employing the language of ballet, a technique developed during the reign of Louis XIV to showcase courtly etiquette and status, Fernandes cultivates a moment of appreciation and an apology to the historically exoticized African artworks. In each image, the dancers act out gestures of respect and perhaps empathy for the masks that once played an important role in the rituals and performance of their own culture but are now isolated high on a plinth in the Museum. By responding to these extracted African artifacts through European traditions, the artist references centuries of colonial deracination. Fernandes reminds us of how little we know or can hope to understand of these objects and their origin when viewed through the myopic lens of the West.
Brendan Fernandes (b.1979, Nairobi, Kenya) attended York University for his bachelor’s with honors (2002), received an MFA from The University of Western Ontario (2005), and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007). Fernandes is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Based in Chicago, the artist’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Committed to creating new spaces and new forms of agency, Fernandes’ projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part protest . . . to foster collaboration and solidarity through actions of generosity and kindness. Fernandes is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious Canada Council New Chapters grant (2017), the Artadia Award (2019), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020). Fernandes’ projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) among many others. In his home city of Chicago, he has exhibited solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Graham Foundation and DePaul Art Museum. He is Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Art Theory and Practice and represented by Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery. Current projects include performances and presentations at the Munch Museum, Oslo; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; The Pulitzer Foundation, St Louis; The Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, and a commission by The DR Vocal Ensemble, Copenhagen.
