Michael Fernandes
No Escape
Multi-media Installation
West Gallery

Canadian Artist

PRESS RELEASE

"No Escape" a muti-media installation incorporates a series of photographs, slide projections, images on the floor and a series of objects within the gallery space. The artist presents in his exhibition "a situation to remind us that man's own doing fuels his journey through a technocratic society."

"All we really wanted was a change - work, a haircut, more food. We wanted to be free.

We used to huddle in short-pants in the shade, making off a circle on the earth. Each player with a rock would aim from a measured distance. We threw the rocks to gather points. We used the game to hone our wits.

The power of imagination was once an innocent device for play."

(Michael Fernandes)

Terrence Johnson and Michael Fernandes at Mercer Union

John Bentley Mays
Globe and Mail, December 1983

A mixed media installation by Johnson, who heads the visual art department at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts; and another by Fernandes, who lives and works in Halifax.

Johnson's resolute piece, called Converging Courses, is composed of large, unpainted squared-off logs lightly shaped to suggest oil tankers and arrayed on the floor. It is accompanied by fine drawings of tanker silhouettes.

This is not, however, a show about toys you can take into the bathtub. Johnson's piece is wary, rigorously formal inquiry into image making. His semi-ships are not unfinished; each of these objects is poised at some place on a line between being a log and being depiction of a ship -- between being small and wood, and suggesting big and metal.

Describing the sculptures this way perhaps make Johnson's inquiries sound ivory-tower indeed. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These days, with artists everywhere making images like crazy, this intelligent cautionary work (and this sort of work) is a tonic.

Michael Fernandes installation, entitled No Escape, contains a huge table and chair handsomely crafted, that make the viewer feel like Alice after she got very small. It also features slides, an audio tape-loop, fuzzy, glossy photos of the world's aboriginal people, and a motion detecting mechanism that switches on the various parts of the installation when you come into the room. I don't understand any of it.