BRENDAN FERNANDES: Within Reach

30 November 2023 - 27 January 2024

BRENDAN FERNANDES: Within Reach
30 November 2023 - 27 January 2024
Performances are scheduled for the afternoons of Saturday 2 December 2023 and 20 January 2024 from 2:30 to 4:30 PM.
Contemporary dancers engage and activate a series of sculptures created by interdisciplinary artist Brendan Fernandes inspired by West African headrests. The traditional headrest, constructed to protect intricate hairstyles, is ergonomically designed to perfectly align the spine and neck and comfortably cradle the head during slumber. Each headrest, ranging from six to seven inches, possesses a unique visual language describing the owner’s status, rank, gender, and age. Inspired by these artifacts, Fernandes scales the objects to ten to eleven inches changing our experience of the piece from headrest to artwork, prop, stool.
BRENDAN FERNANDES, In Being III, 2023

Beyond utility and aesthetic storytelling, the headrests were believed to invoke lucid dreams and guard against nightmares. Serving as a conduit to the ancestors, they were thought to invite a connection to the divine and guidance during sleep. Inspired by these beliefs, Fernandes communicates that link to the spiritual and ethereal through the dancer’s choreography.
Installation view, BRENDAN FERNANDES: Within Reach, Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC. Photo: Adam Reich

As an art object and utilitarian device, Fernandes imbues the sculptures, In Being, with an anthropomorphic quality, like cupping hands meant to cradle the sleeper. Lying horizontally, dancers strike a series of angular poses which embody and activate the sculptures that support them.

Looking back to his early involvement in the NYC club scene, Fernandes choreographs a series of movements riffing on the highly stylized house dance known as voguing. Developed in Harlem during the 1960s at competitions or ‘balls’, voguing’s elaborate pageantry became an exercise of self-expression. The gathering of the different houses organized a safe space of personal liberation for members of the Black and Lantinx LGBTQ+ communities. Fernandes draws on his personal relationship with the dance’s history, choreographing the dancer’s arms to extend vertically towards the sky in an act of release and spiritual solidarity.
It’s interesting because my sculptures are always hybrid, never static; they're props, sculptures, furniture, and artworks.

– Brendan Fernandes
BRENDAN FERNANDES, As One III, 2017

Responding to his early training in ballet and modern dance, Fernandes asks the dancers to lay horizontally in a state of vulnerability and rest. Questioning Western dance’s school of rigid vertical choreography, where each movement expends effort and leads to extreme exhaustion, the artist choreographs moments of respite.

Moving through a meditative moment of self-care, the dancers stretch and pose, occasionally smoothing wrinkles in the fabric beneath them. Their bodies, supported by the sculptures, are padded and protected by distinct red and blue textiles which generate their own visual noise. The bright colors of the Shuka cloth were chosen to ward away the wild animals that inhabit the East African landscape. The protective quality of the sculptures and textiles create an area safeguarded from both physical and spiritual threat. Now situated in the Gallery, the wrinkles and imperfections of the textiles retain the imprint of the body, acting as a testament to past performances.
BRENDAN FERNANDES, In Being II, 2023

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. Using the language of interdisciplinary media, Fernandes composes a layered narrative that critiques and dismantles colonial contexts.
I question my identity, I'm a Kenyan, I'm an Indian, I'm a Canadian, I'm an American, I am a queer punk rock ballerina. I am always living in a sense of Flux.

– Brendan Fernandes
BRENDAN FERNANDES, As One V, 2017

The sculptures seen here are complemented by Fernandes’ photographic project, As One. Originally created as a video commission for the Seattle Art Museum, the performance was later captured in a series of stills using the Cravens Collection at the UB Art Galleries. Here Fernandes choreographs an interaction of his dancers with the Museum’s collection of West African masks.
- BRENDAN FERNANDES, As One X, 2017
- BRENDAN FERNANDES, As One XI, 2017
The masks in the collection present a tension point. Speaking broadly, masks are produced across cultures in Africa and are one aspect of an integral and holistic form of embodied and active pedagogy through ritual. They are worn for public and private performance and storytelling in a collaboratively developed situ and circulated through communities as a source of oral knowledge exchange. Through centuries of colonial violence and capitalistic extraction these specific objects now sit in gallery collections around the world detached from the action, ritual, communities and physical bodies that they were made for.

- Shaun Dacey

"As One," in Still Move: Brendan Fernandes. (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 138.
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. The dancers perform a series of bows and curtsies traditionally known as a Révérence. Executed at the end of a class, a Révérence honors the efforts of both teacher and pianist. 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.
Installation view, BRENDAN FERNANDES: Within Reach, Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC. Photo: Adam Reich
Portrait of Artist, 2021

Photo: Michael Salisbury

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.

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BRENDAN FERNANDES: Within Reach

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