Michael Fernandes is known for his performances and his disturbing and entertaining interventions. Constituting a body of work for posterity does not interest him. Rather, he seeks to compose ephemeral situations within everyday life. In doing so, he ensures that his works have an active dimension; that is to say, they continue to act, to form and to deform after we have left them. In 2012, as part of the Biennale de sculpture in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, invited by the curator of Songlines, the artist built a structure with a trench the size of a grave hole, and inhabited it for ten days.
Stick n’ stones
In the Magdalen Islands, Michael Fernandes will once again inhabit a work, which, this time, will be located in two distinct areas. He plans to create and occupy two sites, a shelter and a dream catcher, between which he will go back and forth. The artist will work without tools brought from away, using only materials available on site. While the shelter will serve as a rudimentary base camp, the dream catcher will take the form of an investigation, in the absurd, of a potentially free imagination and what the surrounding area has to offer. The artist’s itinerary between the two sites will be carefully considered to allow space to cross over from life to art and from art to life. Michael Fernandes’ path: to approach social intelligence from the other way around.
Michael Fernandes (born in Trinidad) is a Canadian experiential artist and art educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work uses familiar, even banal materials to ask the viewer to confront the boundary between daily life and art. Fernandes is an instructor in intermedia at NSCAD University. He has exhibited extensively in Canada, notably at the Blackwood Gallery, Mercer Union, the Power Plant and YYZ (Toronto); the Biennale de Montréal, articule and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montreal); the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina); the National Gallery of Canada and SAW Gallery (Ottawa); the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Eyelevel Gallery and the Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery (Halifax); and internationally, at PS1 (New York City); Art Public Calaf (Barcelona, Spain); In the Context of Art Biennale (Warsaw, Poland). His work was included in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, the national touring exhibition.
Songlines 