The
Uncanny Valley
By Alison Woods
At the end of my visit to this show I was struck by an oddly charming
video by Roman Hrab called "River Road Squiggles," which
runs in a 5-minute-33-second loop and appears to be a bird’s-eye
view of miles and miles of asphalt roadway shot close-up from a
moving vehicle. The lively, jazzy accompanying music, a piece by
DJ Spooky and the Matthew Shipp Quartet, becomes the cheerful ambient
soundtrack for the whole show. It’s an abstract take on a
landscape, with the road being the sole landscape element, but this
was the piece that really struck a chord of recognition for me personally.
It seemed to acknowledge, in its goofy and upbeat way, the painful
reality that in the contemporary Hudson Valley most of us are staring
at the road as often as not, and every road seems to bear an uncanny
resemblance to every other road.
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