P.6 Artist Brendan Fernandes will present the US debut of his light and sound installation, On Flashing Lights, originally presented in 2018 as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. DJ Bouffant Bouffant, host of Gimme a Reason, will provide a special set as partygoers dance in the uneasy glow of police lights, signaling the historical tensions between law enforcement and queer, immigrant, and racialized communities. 

Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. His projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Fernandes’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. 

Fernandes received a BFA from York University in Toronto in 2002, an MFA from the University of Western Ontario in 2005, and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, 2007. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial; Solomon R. Guggenheim  Museum, New York, NY; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Munch Art Museum, Oslo, Norway; MAC Montreal, Canada; among others. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of Canada Council New Chapters grant (2017). He is also the recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014), a Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020). Ferndandes is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.