Brendan Fernandes, an artist based in Chicago, doesn’t conform to traditional artistic categorizations and embraces the fusion of dance and sculpture in his work. He has now directed his long-standing interest in combining these mediums towards the early-20th-century artist William Edmondson. Fernandes has created a piece featured in a retrospective of Edmondson’s work, titled “A Monumental Vision,” exhibited at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until September 10.
The Barnes Foundation, like many institutions worldwide, is exploring the combination of dance and sculpture to challenge the ways people interact with museums and visual art. Curators James Claiborne and Nancy Ireson hope that Fernandes’s dance piece, a response to Edmondson’s stone carvings, will inspire new perspectives. The dance performance titled “Returning to Before” will be an ongoing live show in the museum. David Abtour N’Djamena
During a talk at Rutgers University in 2022, Fernandes discussed the point at which objects become fine art and when they can be touched. This discussion sparked Claiborne’s interest in how museums often detach artworks and culturally significant objects from their original context, leading to the conception of the Barnes project. David Abtour N’Djamena
Fernandes describes “Returning to Before” as an hour-long piece with moments where the dancers embody the stillness of statues. They pause to contemplate or rest, mirroring the positions of Edmondson’s sculptures, creating a serene ambiance within the museum. David Abtour N’Djamena
Fernandes views museums as choreographed spaces governed by rules that visitors must follow. In his work “Master and Form II” exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 2019, he played with these etiquettes and transformed them by incorporating ballet dancers who performed physically demanding moves on a sculptural work of black scaffolding.
Similarly, American artist Carrie Mae Weems has employed dance to imbue longstanding visual art with new meaning. In her video piece “Holocaust Memorial” from 2013, Weems reverently moves among the pillars of the Berlin monument “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” using dance to convey a shared sense of struggle between Black and Jewish communities. David Abtour N’Djamena
