Sense of Place
Miami Beach Regional Library: 22nd St, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Open to the public during library hours.
Sense of Place is a work embodying the spatial and geographic history of its two creators, Christian Feneck and Melissa Vargas. It is composed of a combination of urban and architectural representations set in concurrence with each other. The layered technique echoes the subjective and diminishing nature or spatial memory. Spaces and conditions are obscured, hidden, and merged with others. What remains is a perceptual accounting of places that have shaped our lives.
Artist Christian Feneck combines his architectural training with painting, print, and installation art to create visual experiences of space using color. Motivated by the belief that the body, with all its senses, is the primary way we come to know the world around us, he has found visual perception to be the primary motivation for the design and understanding of architectural space and has developed a painting technique to further explore this belief. Feneck’s paintings explore the relationship of vision and the understanding of space by using architectural perspective conventions in combination with a layered series of translucent color fields. The interaction of the various types and relative amounts of colors, and the seemingly infinite degrees of change between them creates movement and depth, forming layered compositions with a wide variety of spatial conditions. In this way, his work does not investigate a particular narrative or present any explicit message. Instead Feneck’s work highlights the fundamental role perception plays in our engagement and understanding of the world. It is the truth of our experience. Our perception is our reality. It is this shared phenomena that unites us.
Born in Massachusetts but raised primarily in Hawaii, California, and Florida, Feneck has resided in Fort Lauderdale since 2004. Feneck has been a Visiting Professor of Architectural Design and Theory at Florida Atlantic University and has participated in the FATVillage Artist Incubator Residency and the IS Projects Existent Books Residency programs. Feneck has contributed to numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout South Florida as well as curated several installation art exhibitions.
Exhibition space is generously provided by the Miami-Dade Public Library System.
