“UNCANNY VALLEY OF EVERYDAY LIFE”: Works by Princeton artist Margaret Koval will be featured at ArtWRKD Gallery in Newtown, Pa., February 7 though February 23.
ArtWRKD Gallery in Newtown, Pa., presents “The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life,” artist Margaret Koval’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, February 7 through February 23. This series of new paintings offers an 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 the paintings 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 rematerialized pixels of the digital photographs which are the source material for much of Koval’s imagery. more
Bob Dylan put President McKinley back in the national consciousness a few years ago in his song “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” taking the first line from Charlie McCoy’s “White House Blues,” except in McCoy’s version the second line was “Doc said to McKinley, ‘I can’t find that ball,’ “ meaning the second of two bullets fired at close range into the president’s abdomen on September 6, 1901. It happened at the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died on September 14, 1901, a hundred years to the week of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
If David Lynch were still delivering daily weather reports on his YouTube channel, and if he’d lived to see Inauguration Day, his January 20 forecast would have ended with his usual cheery, heartfelt “golden sunshine and blue skies all the way” closing line, topped off with a smile and a vigorous salute, regardless of the actual weather in L.A. or D.C. Unfortunately, actual earthly weather in the form of the Santa Ana winds driving the wildfires devastating his city forced the mandatory evacuation of Lynch’s home on the night of Wednesday, January 8. The timing and the circumstances were, as some online bloggers have noted, “Lynchian.” Not only was the director of Mulholland Drive living adjacent to the street that gave his most celebrated film its title, he was homebound, seriously ill with emphysema, and in need of “supplemental oxygen for most activities.” Even though the evacuation order was rescinded the next morning, the damage had apparently been done. Less than a week later, Lynch’s family announced his January 15 death.
