Field Notes from; Beyond Art and Architecture
Beyond Art and Architecture
July 10th – September 5th, 2025
Back Room Gallery, Arts Warehouse
Curated by Dominique Denis. Featuring Brenda B. | Dominique Denis | Christian Feneck | Danielle Lands | Dominique Petit-Frère, Limbo Accra
Beyond Art & Architecture brings together the work of Brenda B., Dominique Denis, Christian Feneck, Danielle Lands, and Limbo Accra’s Dominique Petit-Frère—exploring practices that cross-examine art, architecture, and design. The exhibition reimagines how environments are created and experienced: transforming overlooked urban sites, translating memory into structure. It invites reflection on how space is shaped—not just physically, but through imagination, memory, and cultural context. The artists gathered within the exhibition for a Q&A, joined by an audience of art spectators, young aspiring architects, and peers alike.
Christian Feneck, who spent over fifteen years in traditional architecture, spoke about his childhood as an endless act of drawing, sketching, and imagining—only to be confronted later with the classic existential prompt: get a real job. He recounts this with a kind of quiet nihilism (the kind that only comes from surviving that tension between expectation and creative impulse, in my opinion anyway). After years of practicing architecture, he pivoted fully into fine art, pursuing painting and installation as a professional career. What carries over from his past life is that blend of architectural rigor—perspective, spatial awareness, sensorial precision—with something looser, more mischievous: color, perception, vision. A child at play, but now armed with decades of technical mastery.
Brenda B. opened by sharing a memory we all recognize: building blanket forts, cocooned, protected, tucked away from the world. Her piece—a bent basswood structure overlaid with textile—immediately brings you there. She chose to exhibit under “Brenda B.,” a soft layer of anonymity, admitting with a nervous giggle that she wasn’t sure how the work would be received. The textile stretches across the convex dome, threads beginning to pull apart in places—like something inside might eventually reach up and push through. There’s both safety and tension here. Protection, but also the inevitability of emergence.
Dominique Petit-Frère, the Ghanaian-Haitian founder of Limbo Accra and Limbo Museum, operates as the high-caliber anchor of the exhibition. Her work—transforming unfinished urban structures, from derelict malls to industrial shells, into cultural platforms—positions the show within a much larger, global conversation. She brings scale, seriousness, and a kind of spatial authority that elevates the entire exhibition, placing emerging and mid-career artists in dialogue with an internationally recognized practice.
Danielle Lands, while not present at the Q&A, contributes a quieter but heady dimension. Her blueprints—precise, sophisticated—reveal an architect deeply attuned to spatial logic and mission-driven conceptual design. If I had the chance to ask her something, it would simply be: how comfortable are you with play?
Dominique Denis, both artist and curator, constructs environments that feel at once monumental and delicate. She isn’t a novice, but you can feel her emerging—stepping out from a background in art administration and claiming her own voice. Her floor-to-ceiling fiber and ceramic structures cascade through the space, forming something between a forest, a nest, a hive. I kept seeing systems—networks—something almost mycelial. I imagined a small information-bearing creature moving through the braided cords, finding shelter in the ceramic forms, resting, then continuing on. It was great.
But her greatest contribution here might be curatorial. Her decision to invite emerging artists—often first-time exhibitors—into conversation with seasoned professionals is a generous and intentional act. In a rare moment of vulnerability, she shared that she wanted to be the person she once needed—a guide, a mentor, a bridge for artists like Brenda. At the same time, she acknowledged that she, too, is learning—finding mentorship and camaraderie in artists like Christian and the internationally recognized Petit-Frère.
There’s a clear thread of childhood and memory running through the exhibition. Brenda’s forts, Christian’s early sketches, Denis’s inner reflections, Petit-Frère’s cocoon-like spatial interventions—they all point back to the act of inhabiting space not just physically, but emotionally. Even when that space is uncertain, or uncomfortable.
During the Q&A, someone asked the inevitable: how might these works translate into real-world architecture? I winced. That familiar tension between creativity and reality surfaced immediately. Budgets, physics, regulations—these are often the quiet killers of imagination. Which is exactly why this show matters. Here, architects are unbound. Free to explore, to imagine, to make without permission.
Childhood wonder, restrained and refined through years of craft, resurfaces here. Ultimately, Beyond Art & Architecture succeeds where it merges play with technique, vulnerability with experimentation, and mentorship with discovery.