Tought troubles

Can you ever truly be alone with your thoughts when your thoughts don’t leave you alone?

In the oil and acrylic paintings that populate Bria Fernandes’ solo show, Things Left Unsaid — on view now at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg — feelings and thoughts of self-doubt, anxiety, grief and displacement show up as physical visitors, often in the most banal moments of daily life. Like when you’re brushing your teeth, say. Or making coffee.

In the 2024 work Ain’t Misbehavin’, they arrive when the central figure is pulling on her socks. A melancholy blue figure leans against her thigh as though seeking comfort. Another appears from behind, hands on her shoulders.

“She’s trying to live her life, and she’s having these thoughts, and the thoughts in her mind are coming out into reality and interacting with her,” Fernandes says.

The 30-year-old Winnipeg-based artist deals with themes of identity and displacement — “and honestly being a Black person living in the world, just the struggles that we deal with,” she says — in her work by exploring these small moments, “the moments that we have to ourselves, whether it be for a split second or like a moment of deep reflection,” on large canvases.

Early on, Fernandes, who earned a bachelor of fine arts from the Alberta University of the Arts, was into artists such as Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí.

The pieces she tended to gravitate towards featured weird figures — “maybe a little bit of horror,” she says — before she got interested in Renaissance figurative painting of angels and the celestial.

“So, I guess I eventually mixed the two,” she says.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the exhibition’s biggest, newest and most surreal work, Step Aside, Splash (2025), which commands the back wall of the gallery.

The central figure is reclining in a bath, bubbles long dissolved into oil, and her expression inscrutable. She’s not alone. Strange people and animals — including a lizard-tongued blue dog — are interrupting her peace. Some emerge from the water; a pair of yellow legs descend from the ceiling.

Peer closer and there’s foliage, as well as a duck that isn’t of the rubber variety. Maybe she’s not in a bathtub at all, but a pond.

“I wanted to just have her inner thoughts just really surround her and be with her and act weird. The figures are her, but they’re from her mind, so they’re kind of like NPCs (non-player characters), not knowing what to do,” she says, referring to the background characters in video games that cannot be manipulated by the person at the controller.

Fernandes uses herself and her mom as references for her figures, often blending the two. She uses her iPad to sketch over photos, and then projects the sketch onto her canvas for scale.

“They’re me, but I don’t like to look at myself, so I change features so that they don’t look 100 per cent like me,” she says.

Things Left Unsaid is Fernandes’ first solo exhibition in Winnipeg, a fact that is making her simultaneously stressed and excited.

It’s been a big year for her: her work has been shown in The Feminine Lived Experience at the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, Alta.; UPRISE 2025: The Art of Resistance at the Untitled Space in New York City; and Threads of Kin and Belonging at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq.

Having her own show was a good push to create new work, she says.

“I am the type of painter that doesn’t paint for fun. I have to have a deadline for me to create,” she says.

Gallery 1c03 curator Jennifer Gibson has been following Fernandes for a few years now and is thrilled to be the one to present her first solo show in Winnipeg.

“I really admire Bria’s vulnerability in delving into this work, which is about the interior and exploring and digging into one’s own feelings and interior thoughts,” she says.

“I think this work is really going to touch people.”

Things Left Unsaid is on view until Oct. 31. Fernandes will be doing an artist talk with Ekene Maduka on Oct. 9 at 10 a.m. in Room 2M70.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca