ART ON THE MART
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Brendan Fernandes celebrates 40 years of house music with Art on the Mart’s latest installation BUILD UP THE HOUSE I n October 1929, one year into the construction of the Merchandise Mart, the American stock market crashed, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. Set to become the world’s largest building at that time, the Mart cost an estimated $26m and
Christie Boxer 4K30s are employed to project the artworks, with a resolution of 6000x2620 pixels. Over a million lumens are projected, approximately the same amount of light needed for more than 25 movie theatres. HOMAGE TO HOUSE At time of writing, the Mart’s most recent art installation is Brendan Fernandes’ Build Up the House . Fernandes’ work honours the essential contributions of African diasporic peoples to American art forms and is accompanied by a house music soundscape by Chicago-based producer Shaun J Wright to celebrate the 40th anniversary of house music. Using the movements of animated dancers to continuously reshape the façade of the building, Fernandes’ work imagines new windows and doorways. In 2016, Fernandes moved to Chicago from New York and began teaching at Northwestern University. It was there that he first met executive director of Art on the Mart Cynthia Noble. “Years later, she asked me if I’d ever consider doing Art on the Mart,” Fernandes begins. “There was a moment when people were questioning how an artist that strictly works with the body is going to translate what he does into this space. Time-based art in digital media has always been a part of what I do. I teach a class at Northwestern currently called Dance for Camera, about how the camera is a choreographic tool. Ways of making and considering technology alongside movement have also been a part of it, so I was really excited.” Fernandes’ journey as an artist began at a young age. “I think I was always in tune with being an artist. I didn’t know what else to do. As I went through high school, I started focusing more on art making as a method for social and political change,” he says. “That carried its way into my work as a grad student and now as a professional artist. I got injured in my senior year of university and stopped dancing, so that’s when I really began to focus on art, sculpture and printmaking. When I moved to New York to study in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study programme, I started to bring dance back into my work. Dance and art came together to support me.”
was an impressive 3.7 million sq ft, spanning two city blocks and rising 25 stories. Opening its doors on 5 May 1930, the final product was a reflection of Chicago’s art deco style of the period. Originally consisting of 13 different warehouses, the building was converted into government offices during World War II. After the war, the Mart was purchased by Joseph P Kennedy and, throughout the late forties and fifties, the building became the single largest producer of trade shows in the United States. Throughout the subsequent decades, the building underwent a series of renovations and, in 2016, new additions included Marshall’s Landing restaurant, cafe and lounge, a fitness centre, a food hall and a 5000 sq ft river programme was introduced. The project employs cutting-edge video mapping techniques to transform the architectural landmark into one of the largest permanent digital art platforms in the world. The installation, 30 years in the making, aims to provide public access to contemporary art for all visitors of Chicago’s iconic Riverwalk. Artists who have contributed to the programme include Yuge Zhou, Nick Cave, Barbara Kruger and Diana Thater. Additionally, the Art Institute of Chicago has a close partnership with Art on the Mart and, as part of this collaboration, the legacies of iconic artists like Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet and Andy Warhol have all been celebrated by showcasing their works. Artists have 2.5 acres of projection park along the Chicago River. In 2018, the Art on the Mart surface to play with across the southern façade of the Mart, equal to the size of roughly two American football fields. To help bring instalments to life, a quarter of a mile of fibre wires are embedded under the river, connecting projections to a custom-designed, weatherproof box built directly into the Riverwalk. More than ten speakers are installed across the Riverwalk for each projection and 34
Words Oliver Webb
Fernandes’ Build Up the House is the site’s most recent art installation in its Art on the Mart project
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