"Michael Fernandes: Room of Fears and Fixing Room"
2006-03-18 until 2006-04-14
Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery
Halifax, NS, CA Canada

Room of Fears is composed of expressions of fear submitted by members of the public via e-mail and through ballot boxes distributed around Halifax, Nova Scotia. The fears were collected over the course of one month, then transcribed onto the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery's walls by the artist and his assistants. The white-on-black statements form a floor-to-ceiling mural of anonymous, fearful voices - a monolithic register of individual vulnerability and collective angst.

In an adjacent space, Fixing Room displays items submitted to the gallery in response to an open call, for "things you never got round to fixing, things that are broken." The "fixed" items call attention to the modern-day impulse to pathologize, as played out in our relationship with the objects in our lives.

Michael Fernandes teaches Intermedia at NSCAD University. He has exhibited and performed throughout Canada and internationally. Through public interventions and gallery installations, Fernandes generates social situations that solicit active participation by others. His work probes the intersection of private life with public space, and the relationship between art and everyday life, by combining linguistic and performance events with humour.

IMAGE
Michael Fernandes
Room of Fears (detail)
Courtesy of the Blackwood Gallery

Related Links:

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