Brendan Fernandes

Artist bridges dance and visual art to explore practices of care during times of crisis.

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In the works that compose Brendan Fernandes’ exhibition, Inaction, on view at the Richmond Art Gallery in Greater Vancouver until April 3, the body is at the centre. This idea speaks quite loudly despite the relative absence of bodies to mark the space. 

Inaction experiments in practices of care that explore movement and intimacy in our austere and isolated world conditions. I was fortunate to visit the gallery during a Zoom rehearsal with Fernandes, a Canadian artist based in the United States who is unable to travel, and local ballet and contemporary dancers. While entering the space is at times to view a predominantly sculptural exhibition, during scheduled performances in March and April, dancers will tenderly activate the minimalist forms, following a score of instructions. 

Fernandes collaborated with the Chicago architecture firm Norman Kelley to create a series of interactive support pieces that refer to childhood play structures as well as found movement – stillness, standing, holding and labour. As the mode of thinking in contemporary art has been almost singly focused on how to create in the midst of ongoing crises, Fernandes gives space and distance to this question by meditating on the task of inactivity. 

Geometric sculptures, all from 2019, are named for their shapes: Triangle, Circle, Tumblers #1-6 and Square. These are porous structures to move through: a steel-tube grid, a massive floor covering with a circular opening at the centre, a cliff-like triangular plinth. Such works display lightness and develop awareness of space or the apparent inability to fill it. What does it mean to produce forms of care during periods of seeming emptiness? 

Fernandes’ intersectional art practice operates on the margin between the visual arts and dance and equally investigates the tensions of perfection in dance aesthetics and the messy experience of being a queer and racialized body. The inclusion of the two-channel video projection Free Fall: for Camera reflects on these difficult crossings, as well as responding to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 queer people, many young folks of colour, were murdered. Just as the last four years have moved with catastrophic speed, Fernandes’ choreography gathers this velocity in the bodies of performers whose moving forms populate the space. 

Free Fall: for Camera casts a through-line of community building, playing on both the community at the centre of queer bar culture, and the one that develops in dance. Particularly palpable are flashes in the film that seem to recall the moment of collective death. Dancers fall together in a startling fashion, then come to lift each other up, all to fall again. 

Borrowing from the aerial film techniques Busby Berkeley used in the 1930s, the film casts an uplifting glow. Literally speaking, it is bathed in sulphuric light, but also the upward motion of interlocked bodies is as joyful as it is elegiac. It’s completely beautiful to watch and I heartily recommend moving your body around the space to involve yourself in this sensory experience from different positions and distances. 

At close proximity, this large-scale work develops a performative intimacy that invites viewers to a kind of participation, clasping bodies with other bodies. It’s helpful as we practice care through distancing, to remember we live not simply in a world of the self, but that this self functions always in relation to other bodies. ■ 

Brendan Fernandes: Inaction at the Richmond Art Gallery in Greater Vancouver from Feb. 12 to April 3, 2021. 

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