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. 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. The enormity of the photo images on the trucks upsets the scale of everything surrounding them. Core’s Drive-Thru, Kingston, appears to shows a gigantic, juicy hamburger planted like an alien visitation among strip-mall buildings, with Thomas Cole-like rock outcroppings in the foreground and mountains in the distance. Look twice, and you realize it’s a truck in a parking lot. The image is so bizarre that you think it must be Photoshopped, but of course the point is that it’s not. If Sharon Core’s photographs approach the surreal, then Carlos Loret de Mola’s convey a sense of déjà vu. You’ve seen these quiet views, or ones like them, a million times, but just never paid much attention. His "Pink Bedroom," for example —a photograph of a small attic room with pink wallpaper that holds some mismatched furniture and an ironing board piled with white brassieres—could be the spare bedroom of any house a friend ever brought you to for the weekend. "Shannon" is a bleak winter tableau: In front of an asbestos-sided house there is a chain-link fence, and in front of the fence is an institutional-style bench with the words “Shannon is a bitch” scrawled in something that looks like red nail polish. The hardscrabble house, the trees and the snow all tell you it’s a Hudson Valley scene, but Frederic Church it’s not.

Ken Landauer’s grids of photographs of decaying resorts have a matter-of-fact tenor that de€ es nostalgia, but they still made me wish I had experienced this region as it was back in the days when the Borscht Belt thrived. Referring to the well-known photo grids of buildings taken by the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Landauer’s "Lost Resorts (bungalows)" series documents a defunct bungalow colony and manages to catalogue pretty much all of the ways those sweet little structures have of sinking into decrepitude—they have mossy roofs, leaning or collapsing porches, broken or dangling doors, gaping window holes. "Lost Resorts (pool and h a n dball) " focuses on the ruins of the resorts’ 1930s-era concrete swimming pools and their weatherbeaten, shredding handball courts. The old pools, with the skeletons of their high and low diving boards intact, are crumbling and empty but for rainwater, and they have trees growing through their cracking oors, but they remain elegantly formed and beautiful to look at.

There’s also much work in "The Uncanny Valley" that doesn’t overtly address the Hudson V alley .Enigmatic installations about relationships (one titled "24 Ways of Being Together Throughout a Day") by Peter Iannarelli consist of candy sprinkles in a glass sphere, lots of inverted glass jars, some Sealy Trucks, Albany 2006 by Sharon Core very clean-looking dirt, little pulsing electrical mechanisms, Scotch tape, string, paper towels, bottle tops, blocks of wood, balloons, bricks, a piece of white bread, paper bags, chrome-and-glass bathroom shelving and other diverse objects, and have the spare, sparkly, dust-free appeal of a laboratory experiment or a store display. Videos by Lindsey Graham, especially one of a woman somersaulting continuously through a series of urban and rural settings, are amusing; conte, charcoal and ink drawings by Rebecca Zilinski are spare and elegant and draw you in through an unexpected hole of white space at the center.

Chris Gonyea’s oil paintings of what look like windswept trees, from his "Deep Forest" series, are light in the center and dark around the edges, suggesting an eerie moment in the eye of a storm. James Holl’s paintings spring directly from the Hudson River School tradition, but without any obvious references to those paintings. Holl disassembles the elements of those historical paintings—colors, brushstrokes, and so forth—and reassembles them into something quite different: large, colorful, indeterminate landscapes featuring funny bubble or lozenge forms.

Richard Deon’s perplexing paintings have a at affect and a recurring €gure that seems to consist of two legs and an extended hand for a head. If it’s possible to be quietly zany, Daniel Bejar’s silent video of a jet en route from Boston to New York, rerouted digitally by the artist and shown side-by-side with a printout of the plane’s ight plan, does it. Susan Magnus’s large installation of Mylar strips hanging from ceiling height shimmers, trembles and re ects the work in the show as well as the viewers, adding to the funhouse effect.

Roads, vehicles and trains run through "The Uncanny Valley," another longstanding part of life in this region, where carriage trails for enjoying scenic views have existed since the 18th century.

Today’s Hudson Valley vista is as likely to feature a four-lane or a parking lot as a grove of trees, though. Margaret Crenson shows very small and handsomely rendered oil paintings of the Taconic Parkway during snow season. Harry Wilks’ black-and-white photographs of bridges, docks and roadsides all seem to be taken from the peculiar point of view of guardrails and handrails, creating a deep perspective in each image that ends at points as majestic as Bear Mountain or the Hudson River, or as mundane as the Plattekill post of€ce. The gorgeous and mysterious "Roadside Landscapes" by Jared Handelsman are large photograms of leaves and plant parts, exposed at night by car headlights along the roadside of his Catskill home.

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.