Façades is the result of a research residency undertaken in France in 2023, during which Alexanne Dunn traversed territories shaped by the mining industrialization of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, in the North of France. There, she encountered places that were at once entirely unknown and strangely familiar, resonating with the nostalgic landscapes of her hometown, Thetford Mines. This journey culminated in a creation residency at the La Napoule Art Foundation on the French Riviera, near Cannes.
From these explorations emerged a series of photographs of industrial architecture, which Dunn then reframed, enlarged, and transposed into painting. Each canvas presents itself as an autonomous fragment, severed from its original context. The processes of digital enlargement and reframing transform the images into ambiguous surfaces that sometimes verge on abstraction. Color noise, photographic blur, and chromatic aberrations, qualities inherent to the photographic medium, become fundamental pictorial elements in her work. From one piece to the next, a play of scale unfolds within the exhibition space. For Dunn, the goal is not so much to document specific sites as to evoke in the viewer an impression—a sensitive construction, both fragmentary and formal, of a place that mobilizes memory and invites the audience to fill in the gaps.
The title Façades refers first to architecture, but it also invokes the medium of painting. The term denotes what is presented as visible—what asserts itself as reality, sometimes deceptively so, concealing a more complex structure beneath. Just as an architectural façade can offer a partial or misleading view of a building, painting provides a partial, transformed, or transfigured representation of reality, suggesting multiple levels of interpretation. Thus, the exhibition is built around an analogy between architectural, pictorial, and social surfaces.
