In an ambitious new monograph, Kenyan-born, Chicago-based Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes (born 1979) chronicles his two most recent exhibitions, Contract and Release at The Noguchi Museum (2019) and The Master and Form, originally conceived and created in 2018 during a residency with the Graham Foundation, and later presented at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

These performance-based installations feature live dancers interacting with Noguchi’s colorful, unstable sculptures and a collection of architectural steel cages resembling ballet barres. The objects in both exhibitions act as training devices and physical constraints, both aiding and encumbering the dancers, and encouraging poses that test their endurance in overt displays of physical tension and self-control.

The work engages with notions of discipline and mastery, pain and pleasure, and aims to disrupt and consolidate ballet and modern dance traditions.