In conversation with Brittani Arnold, curator of Herald at Gallery 12.26
The first thing Brittani Arnold remembers about church is her thighs sticking to the pew.
She was five, enrolled in a Catholic school in Michigan. In the text she wrote for Herald, her three-person exhibition at Gallery 12.26, she catalogs what stayed with her: leather, wood, old books, candle smoke. Pulling her socks up so she wouldn’t have to touch the kneelers. Stained glass, the goblet on the altar, the candlesticks, the priest’s robes in green and burgundy and gold. What did not stay was the content of a single sermon.
“Even before I fully understood my desires as sinful,” she writes, “my faith was defined by a fear of retribution.”
Asked about it now, she keeps the present tense. “The fear and anxiety that I internalized still feels so visceral,” she says.
That is an enormous amount of apparatus aimed at one small body, and the arrangement is what the exhibition is actually about.
Herald gathers eleven works by Jennifer Carvalho, Em Kettner, and Simon Petepiece across two rooms on Manufacturing Street. Nine of them are small. Carvalho’s largest painting is twenty by sixteen inches. Two are nine by twelve. Kettner’s porcelain sits inside apertures cut into cherry and walnut panels, and the porcelain is a few inches across. Then there is Petepiece’s Trinity, whose spire reaches nine feet, and Fan, a steel wheel nine and a half feet in diameter.
Arnold went looking for that gap. The beauty of the church and her fear of it arrived in the same room at the same age, and she wanted the gallery to carry both at once. “The tension between this grandiose aesthetic and the complex feelings I associated with it, felt like something I wanted to try to reflect in the physical gallery space in some way,” she says.
She did not plan to open with the pew. “Funny enough, my early drafts of the press release did open with a more didactic account of art historical references,” she says. “I was initially hesitant to open with my personal narrative. It felt quite vulnerable, and I was worried about centering myself too much in the overall thesis of the show.” A colleague pushed her to move it to the front. “Talking about spirituality is inherently vulnerable, and ultimately, sharing my relationship to this topic felt like a more honest introduction for the show.”
Arnold attended Catholic school but never completed confirmation and describes herself now as firmly agnostic. What she kept is the visual education. “I’m really interested in the idea of inception points,” she says. “A first experience, or encounter. I’m intrigued by the influence that an initial introduction can have on our broader sensibilities, aesthetics, yes, but also moral belief systems, or the lack thereof.”
Jennifer Carvalho paints what is left after the holy figures are taken out.
The title of one canvas says so outright: Predella with figures removed and weeping eyes. A predella is the horizontal strip of small narrative panels running along the base of an altarpiece, the part that carried the story while the main panel carried the icon. Carvalho keeps the architecture, a stack of orange and gold arches against deep blue and deletes the cast. What is left, floating in the arcade where saints should be standing, is a pair of eyes.
She does it again in Study of natural motifs (garden fresco with brocade robe and honour cloth). A cloth of honor is the textile hung behind an enthroned saint or Virgin to mark the space as sacred. Carvalho paints the brocade, the fresco, and the folds, and skips whoever they were installed to dignify. Both paintings are nine by twelve inches. You could hold either one in two hands. The surface repeats the maneuver. “In person, the surface texture of Jennifer’s paintings feels more akin to that of a fresco or even a tapestry,” Arnold says. A painting of a fresco that behaves like fresco, a painting of brocade with the density of cloth.
This is the practical form of what Arnold calls malleability. “Her source material primarily consists of fragments from European artworks made from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” she says. “She’s taking these pieces, removed from their original context, and creating new compositions.” The removal is not a metaphor in Carvalho’s hands. It is the working method, executed at a scale that fits on a desk.
Mourning women (Garofalo) keeps its figures, and 12.26 has hung it alone on a wall wide enough for a mural. Two women, one in a pale wrapped headdress with her mouth open, the other behind her in profile, on a ground that goes nearly black. Sixteen by twenty inches, marooned. The painting belongs to an ongoing series of weeping women drawn from Northern Renaissance deposition scenes, the tradition that produced Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross, and the parenthetical names the specific source Carvalho worked from. Cut loose from the Passion, the grief has nowhere in particular to go. “They are more adaptable to present day maladies,” Arnold says, “potentially speaking to a contemporary feeling of anxiety.”
Then there is Maenad—at twenty by sixteen inches, it’s the largest work Carvalho has in the show. Maenads were the ecstatic female followers of Dionysus, revered for their proximity to the divine and feared for the wildness that proximity required. Arnold is not interested in them as history. “Myths are not merely stories about gods and heroes; they are stories about recurring relationships to authority, desire, fear, sacrifice, and justice,” she says. A myth is a container that keeps getting refilled.
In the exhibition text she argues that in a moment defined by renewed contests over female bodily autonomy and the policing of female rage, the painting reads less as an artifact than as a mirror. It is the one place in her writing where she names a live political condition, and it lands partly because the painting is so small. The claim arrives at the size of a paperback.
Em Kettner is where the exhibition turns, and where the fear in Arnold’s opening paragraph gets answered.
Kettner’s four works are glazed porcelain set into oil-sealed cherry and walnut, and what hangs on the wall is almost entirely wood. The Pig Run is a plank of cherry thirteen by thirty-three inches with two small openings cut into it. Circe’s House has one. The porcelain inside each is a few inches across, recessed and beveled so deeply that from any angle except straight on you see nothing at all. On a wall twelve feet high in a room with exposed ductwork and polished concrete, the thing you have come to look at is roughly the size of a matchbook, and you will not see it from across the room.
The scale is a position, not a preference. Kettner has muscular dystrophy, and her work proceeds from the ancient practice of leaving a votive at an altar: a small object shaped like the afflicted part of the body, offered as a prayer for healing. She has described wanting to twist that logic, so the votive stops meaning suffering and starts meaning that this is a valuable body and a valuable experience. She has also said the point of the frames is that the full picture includes the sensation of missing part of it.
Arnold felt the shift in the room. “Em Kettner’s wall sculptures of wood and tiny porcelain paintings add another layer of contrast, while also providing an unexpected warmth, and visual relief,” she says. “The scale of Em’s work also encourages the viewer to get really close to it. I love that there’s such an intimacy to viewing her work.”
That is the whole argument of Herald in one gesture, and it is worth saying plainly. Sacred architecture was built to make a body feel small and looked at. Arnold’s opening paragraph is a child pinned by it. Kettner takes the same tools, smallness and enclosure and the demand that you approach, and turns them toward care. The visual language does not change. Who it is designed to serve does.
The titles carry it further. Circe’s House. The Pig Run. The Fates in the Pigpen. Circe turned Odysseus’s men into swine. The Fates measured out how long anyone got. These are myths about bodies being changed without consent and lifespans being assigned by someone else, which is also a fair description of a doctor’s office. Kettner has traced that assumption from Greek myth through medieval Christianity into contemporary medicine. Put Circe’s House in the same building as Maenad and the two rooms start talking: women in altered bodies, revered and suspect, the story told in both cases by somebody else.
Simon Petepiece builds with the parts of a room nobody is meant to notice. Drywall, galvanized steel studs, primer, and joint compound.
Trinity, from 2025, is not the monolith its dimensions suggest. Most of it sits at roughly waist height: a long flat deck of steel track laid out in a grid, carried on rows of studs that have been split and twisted at the base, so they flare open like fluted piers. From above it reads as a nave, an arcade of columns marching toward a far end. At that end a drywall spire rises to nine feet and tapers to a point, with narrow vertical openings cut where a steeple would have windows.
It is a cathedral at model scale, which puts a viewer in two positions at once. You look down on the colonnade the way an architect does, and up at the steeple the way a congregant does. Arnold wanted exactly that circuit. “I knew I wanted visitors to be able to walk around the full perimeter of his work.”
She also had to solve for how it would arrive. Shortly after Petepiece agreed to the show, she called and asked whether he would consider a residency in Texas. He spent two months at the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, fifty miles south of Dallas, in the preserved 1890s Odd Fellows Lodge that Kyle Hobratschk has been converting into studios since 2012. “I wanted him to create work that felt ambitious, but it would have been cost prohibitive to ship these sculptures from Canada,” Arnold remarks. “His large-scale sculptures really gave the presentation an immersive feel that mimics a place of worship in many ways.”
Fan, 2025, hangs in the second gallery and is a rose window. Nine and a half feet across, studs radiating from a bolted central oculus, a ring of circular foils running around the rim: the tracery of a Gothic wheel window assembled from the cheapest structural material sold, left raw, punch-outs and burrs intact. Sunflower, at twenty-four by eighteen inches, is the same geometry drawn in joint compound on drywall, a devotional object and a monumental one by the same hand in the same show.
The rooms themselves get recruited. From the second gallery, the spire of Trinity is visible through a doorway, framed and far off, before you have walked anywhere near it. That is the oldest move sacred architecture has: put the destination at the end of an aperture and make the body travel toward it. The gallery already had the aperture. Petepiece supplied the spire.
Arnold has thought carefully about what happens to an image when it leaves the building it was made for.
“Long before art was exhibited in museums, it served a much more utilitarian function,” she says. “Religious imagery in art provided a way for people to experience religion visually, telling stories through pictures.” In a church that image carries authority conferred by ritual and community rather than by the object itself. “Viewers are often participants as much as observers.” In a gallery it becomes an aesthetic and historical artifact, and the reverence stops being required.
She is careful not to make that sound like liberation. Asked whether Herald is about what we inherit or what we reject, she declines the frame. “Inheritance has a sense of inevitability about it. We can view history through different perspectives, debate accuracy and bias, but we can’t change it. Rejection feels more voluntary; active. There is a choice there.” What interests her is what the three artists are doing to the timeline. “I think Herald is more interested in the way that the three artists in this show are challenging our linear conceptions of time, history, spirituality, folklore, and mythology.”
What has surprised her is how much visitors want to talk. “Throughout the show run, I’ve felt really moved by the willingness of visitors to talk about their relationship to religion or spirituality,” she says. “I think that places of worship and art galleries actually share many similar qualities. There is a formality, performance, pageantry, as well as a sense of confrontation.”
What Herald changes is the direction of the pressure. In Arnold’s first paragraph a five-year-old sits in a room built to make her feel watched and pulls her socks up so her skin will not touch the kneeler. At 12.26 the largest object in the room is a church you can see over the top of, and the thing you have actually come for is a few inches of porcelain set behind a hole in a plank, invisible until you are close enough to fog it.
Herald: Jennifer Carvalho, Em Kettner, and Simon Petepiece is on view at Gallery 12.26 through August 1.