96.5 x 121.9 cm
Opening Reception: September 17th, 5:00–7:00 PM
moniquemeloche is pleased to present The Noise Will Sound, a solo exhibition by Brendan Fernandes, and the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery. Born in Kenya and raised in Canada, Fernandes’s practice operates at the intersection of dance and visual arts, addressing issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. A classically trained ballet dancer turned visual artist, Fernandes challenges Western institutional structures like ballet and museums from within to expose and rework the systems of power, spectatorship, and belonging embedded in them.
The Noise Will Sound presents a series of photographs shot on film, which feature figures shrouded in patterned Shuka cloth, a vibrant checkered fabric traditionally associated with the Maasai people of Kenya yet rooted in British colonial influence. Originally commissioned in 2025 by the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Fernandes produced textiles composed of vivid red and blue plaid to investigate themes of visibility, protest, the legacy of empire, and embodied resistance. The textiles were then performed in as a duet, activated by dancers who engaged in a choreographic dialogue by concealing and revealing each other – reclaiming a colonial textile legacy into a site of protection and presence. Fernandes has explored this pattern often throughout his practice as a visual and rhythmic language, and recently incorporated it into Build Up the House (2024), a site-specific projection on the façade of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. There, its repetition and saturated color operated like a musical pulse, connecting textile, movement, and sound while bringing Fernandes’s Kenyan heritage into conversation with Chicago’s house music history.
In his new series, Noise See, Fernandes turns movement into a fixed image, transferring the textiles from the ephemeral to the permanent by restaging the performance for the camera. The use of analog film photography is particularly meaningful, as the materiality of film introduces questions of memory and loss, and resists the idea of the perfect image. Grain, overexposure, and the use of depth of field creates shifts between clarity and obscurity, allowing certain bodies, gestures, and details to emerge while others recede, while the vibrant pairing of blue and red pigment dances with the senses. This ultimately contributes to the noise, allowing its gestures to reverberate across time and media. Yet the photograph is also evidence of absence, the body is no longer there and what remains is a trace. This tension of presence and disappearance, or noise and silence in this case, is fundamental to Fernandes’s work, as is the use of photography as a space to reconsider and reconstruct performance.
The exhibition also debuts a series of mixed media paintings on Belgian linen. Producing the paintings is parallel to the way Fernandes approaches choreography in his practice. Materials are assembled, applied, and orchestrated, occupying the canvas like performers occupy a stage. Behaving like bodies, the paintings feel gestural. Stitching, screen printing, staining, and hand-painted elements function as distinct movements within a composition, establishing rhythms, repetitions, interruptions, and moments of improvisation. Elements enter and exit the visual field like bodies moving through space, blurring the boundaries of shape shifting identity and the space between closeness and distance. The series becomes a conversation between materials, making the process itself audible.
The Noise Will Sound invites viewers to consider how we see sound, how we hear images, and how abstraction can become both an act of resistance and an invitation to look more carefully. It suggests that noise and silence are not opposites, but conditions that continually shape one another.
