The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life

The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life, artist Margaret Koval’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. This captivating series of new paintings offers a profound exploration of the disquieting and surreal landscape of contemporary America, presenting an arresting gaze into the deep strangeness of where we live now.
The disquiet starts with paintngs themselves which both depict and embody the show’s title. Executed
with oils on high-grade burlap, their physical presence tricks the eye into seeing textiles — tapestries,
needlepoints, or thread-worn rugs. Paint is slathered onto the back of the canvas and forced through the
open-weave material. What extrudes out the front appears as loops of yarn, colored threads… or
sometimes like the re-materialized pixels of the digital photographs which are the source material for
much of Koval’s imagery.
This slippage between media is intentionally uncanny – and in service of her overall vision: there is no
terra firma here. Pedestrians can liquify into oozing paint, yet remain recognizably human. Streetlights
don’t illuminate so much as they drip onto cars and bushes. Neighborhood homes loom with menacing
appeal while roads and parks appear as liminal spaces, aglow in unnatural, night-for-day lighting. And
through it all, a sense of voyeurism reigns — underscored by the high angle perspective of surveillance
cameras or the obscured viewpoint of hidden watchers.
While faintly unsettling, the overall effect simultaneously stirs visual delight. Koval often leans on the
cinematographic toolkit she developed as a documentary filmmaker for the framing and lighting of her
pieces. But her painterliness is no less on view. Her strands of rich, tertiary colors, sometimes hover over
surfaces stained in complementary or analogous hues to create optically complex and deeply beguiling
paintings. At times, they can vibrate like a flickering video screen. At times, they feel as comforting as a
home-sewn sampler on grandma’s wall – or as old-world as a Persian carpet. That’s the seduction. It’s
obvious there’s a deeper message behind the faux domesticity and it’s something like this: “face the
strangeness; it’s where we all live now.”
Exhibition Details
● First Friday Preview: February 7, 2025
● Second Saturday Artist Celebration: February 15, 2025
● Artist Dialogue: February 23, 2025