Beautiful Losers

Additional Information

Michael Fernandes, installation view, Beaverbrook Art Gallery

This exhibition presents art that conveys the almost ineffable ambiguity of existence. It explores pathos, frailty, fear, and indifference. Janet Werner presents a wall of larger-than-life portraits created from her imagination. Despite their inherent anonymity one feels that they know the people portrayed. These figures tend toward melancholy, pathos, or boredom. Their stillness belies an ocean of feeling underneath the surface. One wishes they could speak. As a counterpoint to these silent, but evocative portraits, Michael Fernandes presents a wall of fears. This list is a compilation of fears submitted by people in Regina, through ballot boxes located around the city. Werner's faces are a specific, identifiable source of an unknown, but obviously loaded, state of being. Fernandes' list of fears, like messages in a bottle, provide a specific emotional position, from an anonymous source. They externalize the internal. Like a call-and-response, there is a dialogic relationship between Werner's and Fernandes' artwork. There is further resonance between these works. Fernandes' installation My Fears includes various objects which are fixed by the artist. This process of fixing is analogous to the "fixing" in Werner's portraits, through a process of layering the painting, leaving traces or histories visible just below the surface.