Monique Meloche Gallery presents Brendan Fernandes: The Noise Will Sound, on view from 17 September through 24 October 2026, marking the artist's third solo exhibition with the Chicago gallery. Born in Nairobi in 1979 and raised in Canada, Fernandes works at the intersection of dance and visual arts, addressing race, queer culture, migration, and collective movement through hybrid forms that blend ballet, protest, and performance.
The exhibition centers on Noise See, a series of photographs shot on analog film that capture figures shrouded in Shuka cloth, the vibrant checkered fabric traditionally associated with the Maasai people of Kenya. The textiles, commissioned in 2025 by the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, were produced in vivid red and blue plaid to investigate visibility, protest, and the legacy of empire. Dancers performed the cloth as a duet, concealing and revealing each other in choreographic dialogue that reclaimed a colonial textile into a site of protection and presence.
Fernandes's use of film photography introduces questions of memory and loss, resisting the idea of the perfect image. Grain, overexposure, and shifts in depth of field create oscillations between clarity and obscurity, allowing certain bodies and gestures to emerge while others recede. The photograph becomes evidence of absence: the body is no longer there, only a trace remains. This tension between presence and disappearance, noise and silence, runs through Fernandes's practice as he uses photography to reconsider and reconstruct performance.
The exhibition also debuts mixed media paintings on Belgian linen, produced through a process parallel to choreography. Materials are assembled, applied, and orchestrated across the canvas like performers on a stage. Stitching, screen printing, staining, and hand-painted elements function as distinct movements within each composition, establishing rhythms, repetitions, and interruptions. Elements enter and exit the visual field like bodies moving through space, blurring boundaries between shape, identity, and the distance between closeness and separation.
Fernandes, an associate professor at Northwestern University, has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other institutions. His work appears in public collections including the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he continues to create spaces for collective movement and solidarity.
Image: Noise See VI, 2026. digital archival print from film on Canson Baryta Photographique paper. © Brendan Fernandes, courtesy of the Monique Meloche Gallery
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