The Queer Body in the Landscape
with Brendan Fernandes & Fleming Staples
PERFORMANCE, FILM & VIDEO 611 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025
This class will explore what it means for a queer body to define, exist, and perform in a landscape. Combining embodiment, ecology, and moving image, the course will use the camera as a witness to performances that are collaboratively built out of movement workshops. We will learn about some of the ecosystems present on and around Ox-Bow’s campus, and feel how our bodies are in conversation with these environments. We will explore the use of the camera as a choreographic tool to capture movement but also as a means to create movement gestures. Students will learn camera skills and video editing and participate collectively in creating a movement vocabulary. We will view works by Ana Mendieta, Yétúndé Olagbaju, mayfield brooks, Pina Bausch, and Maya Deren and discuss the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Paulina Ruiz Carballido, and Resmaa Menakem. Assignments will include researching local plants and ecosystems and creating mini-performances inspired by them, as well as a “video in a day” exercise, where everyone gets a chance to be behind and in front of the camera in the morning and edit in the afternoon. This two-week course, taught collaboratively by artist and choreographer Brendan Fernandes and artist and cinematographer Claire Fleming Staples, will culminate with a public screening of collaboratively produced videos. Students will have access to cameras and tripods from Ox-Bow but should bring their own laptops. For those without access to Adobe Premiere editing software, a temporary license will be provided.
Brendan Fernandes, 72 Seasons, 2021, performance, variable
72 Seasons engages with ballet history to envision the same passages of time
demarcated by seasons for the twenty-first-century. Initiating the project in the Lurie Garden within the City of Chicago’s Millennium Park, the movement-based piece brings together a group of dancers in acts of utilitarian choreography. Departing from a Western vision of phases, where the division of all perceptible change in our environment is collapsed into four categorical types, Fernandes encourages a deeper observation of humans’ relationship to the natural world.
Brendan Fernandes (he/him; b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024) and the Artadia Award (2019), among others. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); among many others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.
Claire Fleming Staples, time is a rubber band, 2023, video installation
Fleming (they/them) is a queer multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of somatics, sound, politics, and new media. Throughout their multi-faceted practice they are exploring embodiment as a tool for collective liberation. In their immersive installations of expanded cinema, haptic components direct physical attention by means of vibrations, allowing the participant to move seamlessly through an expanding portal of digital reality while maintaining body awareness. In their live desktop performances, a guiding topic propels the viewer on a journey through a deep and eclectic media archive, illustrating political, emotional, and spiritual realities in the familiar intimacy of the personal screen, projected into the shared space. Collaboration and pedagogy are two important vectors of their practice, as a long term member of underground creative communities in which they are engaged in care work and organizing. They currently work and reside in Chicago, Illinois, where they are a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.