NYAB Event - Katrina Chamberlin "Into the Uncanny Valley"

Katrina Chamberlin "Into the Uncanny Valley"

Gana Art Gallery

This event has ended.

Gana Art New York presents Into the Uncanny Valley, an exhibition of taxidermy sculpture installations and oil on canvas works by artist Katrina Chamberlin. Coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori, the term "uncanny valley" refers to the drastic drop in empathetic identification that occurs in a spectrum of identification with human-like creatures when the object becomes eerily human. This drop is characterized by deep revulsion and recoil as is often experienced when we encounter human-like robots. This encounter with the uncanny is the underlying theme of Chamberlin's diverse body of work as she explores borderline phenomena at the boundaries of cultural identity and otherness, displacement and relocation, in an increasingly cross-fertilized global culture. This will be her first solo exhibition in New York.

Having grown up as a foreigner in Europe and subsequently in Japan, Chamberlin discovered first-hand the difficulty of fully integrating herself to her surroundings, resulting in a deeply conflicted sense of identity. In studying depictions of foreign minorities in the Japanese media, she observed that Westerners were characterized as mostly innocuous and wide-eyed, whereas the Latino, African and non-Japanese Asians were portrayed as inferior and threatening. Chamberlin's portraits of bi-racial children, part Japanese and part foreign, acutely generate the uncanny valley effect with their adorable faces that are partially masked by rubber-whiskered animal noses. In costume, they successfully morph into cartoon figures that are impossible to categorize as either foreign or native.

Her sculptures titled Cold Hands, Warm Heart and The Girl and the Coyote involve taxidermy animals that display human characteristics, and vice-versa. The crying sheep and the sleeping coyote and girl are, in the artist's own words: "wholly familiar in their display, yet foreign in their actions." As artist James Kubie states: "Katrina Chamberlin pushes us to the threshold of carefully crafted wonder and offers us a chance at transformation, an opportunity to drop our jaded exteriors in order to marvel unabashedly." With both works, the uncanny stems from the familiar that is disrupted and destabilized by fantasy. In Freud's German original, the uncanny as the unheimlich-or the un-homely-brings closer to home the abject visceral impact of that which lies at the border. Chamberlin's art does not hedge from taking the plunge into the abyss of the in-between.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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