Return to search results

Michael Fernandes: Room of Fears and Fixing Room

Michael Fernandes Room of Fears (detail)

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.

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. The fears were collected over the course of one month, then transcribed onto the gallery walls by the artist and his assistants. The writing forms a blackboard-like graffiti of anonymous voices, working both to amplify and to dispel the spectators’ anxieties.

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.

Support from the Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully appreciated.

Exhibition Catalogue

Read news coverage from the Halifax Daily News

Fernandes Interview on "Sounds Like Canada"

Return to search results