Uncanny: seeing something that is almost right; something so close to what it’s ‘supposed’ to be, but just off enough that it gives off a feeling of unease. It’s an odd phenomenon, yet why is it universal?
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, featuring more than 60 works and 30 artists, is investigating the uncanny through a unique feminist lens from Feb. 28 to Aug. 10.
The exhibition prompts viewers to take a second glance at its off-putting work and place their psychological instincts in conversation with ideas of womanhood, stereotypes of female artistic styles and concepts of feminine bodies.
The exhibit features an array of artistic mediums, including sculptures, videos, collages, audio and photography in addition to paintings and intermixed styles.
Several of the works are featured in a booklet handed out at the entrance of the museum containing descriptions and questions intended to further understanding of the uncanny effect, as well as comments from the artists themselves.
Martine Gutierrez’s “Body En Thrall” (2018) is a photographic piece from Gutierrez’s satirical fashion magazine, “Indigenous Woman.” The photograph, which features them, though Gutierrez does not consider it a self portrait and explores their identity as trans and nonbinary, uses elements of uncanny familiarity by drawing the viewer’s attention to the cut cantaloupe melons in their bra and their intense stare.
Other photographs featured in the booklet include Angela Strassheim’s untitled works, which explore her childhood memories and young girls’ lives more generally. An otherwise harmless idea, these photographs, with the indescribable uncanny feeling they give off, paint an eerie setting that contrasts childhood with motherhood.
From babies laid on the floor almost as if they were placed there, to the realness of a little girl with a clearly fake bird positioned unnaturally on her hand, Strassheim’s past experience as a forensics photographer shines through in her uncanny work.
One striking sculpture not featured in the booklet is Mathilde ter Heijne’s “Fake Female Artist Life,” sculptures #1, #2 and #3 (2003). Heijne created life-sized wax sculptures based on female artists featured in 20th-century novels: Elvira Goulot from Guillaume Apollinaire’s “La femme assise,” Elaine Tilley from Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” and Ueno Otoko from Yusanari Kawabata’s “Beauty and Sadness.”
There is also an accompanying audio of womens’ voices orating excerpts from their stories centered around the challenges female artists face globally. By pairing the uncanny realism of the wax sculptures with the off-putting audio, the work comments on the difficulty of making it as a female artist and how that translates across cultural borders.
Another notable audio-visual piece is Stephanie Dinkins’ “Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2” (2018). Shown across four screens, Dinkins shows herself conversing with an android that resembles Bina A. Rothblatt, the wife of the cofounder of Terasem Movement, a foundation dedicated to the “maximum extension of human life,” as stated in the description next to the piece.
The android responds to Dinkins’ questions about Hanson Robotics, the technology company responsible for the manufacturing of the android itself, and consciousness with an eerily human vocabulary, even featuring colloquial filler words such as “um” and “you know.”
Not only is the uncanny nature of the android’s responses notable, but her responses were developed by the men at Hanson Robotics, illustrating biases and potential ethical questions posed in the coding of these technologies. The work makes a larger comment on how women exist in an ever-advancing, artificially intelligent technological space.
Despite how common the uncanny effect is, this exhibit is one of the first artistic demonstrations of how to look at this phenomenon in relation to preconceived notions of femininity, pulling from female artists across borders with a shared interest in depicting the eerily familiar as an address of feminist issues in conversation with other topics such as identity, motherhood and technology.
This article was edited by Jessica Ackerman, Marina Zaczkiewicz and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Olivia Citarella, Emma Brown and Ella Rousseau.
