The
Uncanny Valley
By Alison Woods
The
fun of this show is the way every piece in it is just a little bit
off – images look like other things or riff on other artwork
(even Hudson River School painting, as it happens,) unexpected relationships
are exposed, the scale or nature of objects is ambiguous. Some work
has a zany quality; some is puzzling. Among the paintings in the
show there’s a weirdness to the subject matter or the treatment
of the subject matter that belies the traditional nature of the
medium.
While "The Uncanny Valley" includes work that spans the
spectrum of disciplines (there’s photography, painting, drawing,
video, installation, and sculpture,) it’s the photography
that really makes you think about what’s familiar and what’s
strange in the contemporary Hudson Valley, maybe because it’s
so easy to recognize its content as being local. Looking at the
photographs in "The Uncanny Valley," I kept having the
sense that I recognized objects or locations that I’d never
really seen before and the recurring thought, “Oh, yeah—that
thing.” I was also reminded of the pang I always get when
I emerge from the Target store at the Hudson Valley Mall. I’m
greeted by what may be the best view in Ulster County, but it’s
also the most disconcerting—the Catskills rising nobly behind
the Burlington Coat Factory. Ouch.
The absolute standouts among the photographs in "The Uncanny
Valley" are the ones by Sharon Core, who takes pictures of
eighteen-wheelers in the parking lots of Kingston and other urban
areas in the region. The trucks are effectively billboards on wheels,
plastered with huge, color-saturated, outsize images of food and
people—advertisements for the corporations whose goods they
carry....
CONTINUE.... |
