The
Uncanny Valley
By Alison Woods
The
Hudson Valley is full of artists and galleries, yet anyone who looks
at art around here much knows that a really fresh take on the region
and its landscape is hard to come by. But a new show, called "The
Uncanny Valley," at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY
New Paltz, is like a little funhouse of slightly—or in some
cases, radically—odd work by local artists. While the peculiarity
of the work in the exhibition may not register immediately because
the museum setting confers a certain dignity on the proceedings,
the Dorsky’s new curator, Brian Wallace, has chosen pieces
that prove that what he considers to be a long tradition of strange
art in this region—beginning with Hudson River School painting—continues
apace.
The
show is the museum’s annual survey of the state of art in
the Hudson Valley, focusing on the work of young and mid-career
artists. Its title borrows a term from the €eld of robotics that
describes the uncomfortable point at which a robot begins to resemble
a human so closely that it becomes deeply repellent to the people
who meet it. When he arrived in New Paltz Wallace had that phrase,
Uncanny Valley, in mind because of his previous work at Boston’s
Computer Museum, and for his €rst of these survey shows at the Dorsky
he loosened up the notion and recast the uncanny as being “the
sense of unease brought on by contact with an image at once familiar
and strange.” He put out a call for submissions based on that
idea and heard from more than 150 Hudson Valley artists; 23 were
chosen for this show.
Wallace
maintains that “uncanny” art is nothing new in the region.
In his view, the Hudson River School paintings, in spite of the
prevailing belief that they are “normal” landscapes
by those of us who haven’t really spent much time looking
at them, are in fact deeply weird in their own way, with little
narratives and metaphorical references to the cycle of life encoded
in them and extreme distortions built into the paintings’
physical space....CONTINUE.... |
