Margaret Koval: "The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life"
ArtWRKD Gallery
128 S State St.
Newtown, PA
Feb. 7, 2025
Artist Margaret Koval fed Chat GPT her portrait of an anonymous face and requested a review.
“In examining the tension between surface and depth, light and shadow, figuration and abstraction, Koval positions this work as both a formal inquiry and a profound exploration of what it means to be seen – and not seen,” the software spat out.
That rave write-up is posted on the wall of ArtWKD gallery, where Koval’s series of surveillance-inspired paintings are on display as part of her singular show, “The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life.”
“It’s a term my son who was a mad crazy gamer taught me,” Koval said of the expression, “uncanny valley.” The concept describes the sensation of unease we feel when encountering an entity that is almost human… but not. Like Chat GPT.
“It came out with perfect art blab,” Koval complimented. “It’s a little bit affirming. But also scary.”
The retrospective captures Koval’s personal shift out of TV journalism and documentarian work into the fine art world. After a career spent compiling sparse archival source material and producing fresh footage, Koval has retired into scouring surveillance images — and refashioning them into unique works of art.
Koval’s scenes come across, from a distance, as intricate embroideries of modern life. But what look like loose threads are actually spools of pigment; the only fabric involved in the creative process is a burlap sack, through which Koval pushes the paint in order to create a piled-on 3D effect. What was once plain burlap becomes a canvas, and the stolen image gradually develops into a dry mound of color.
The closer you look, the more imperfect the picture appears. Take, for example, Koval’s depiction of a red house. At first, it looks like an ornate tapestry detailing a certain type of suburban grandiosity. Hours of labor must have gone into translating the delicate bloom of front yard hydrangeas. But face to face with the image, we’re met only with the illusion of intricacy. The reality is something closer to old paint peeling off the walls, revealing an inconsistency of shape and form that pushes us into a state of existentialism. The lawn at the foreground is conceptually transformed into a green wall of fire, and holes are poked (literally) into our ingrained devotion to domestic normalcy. Suddenly, we’re watching a pixelated rendering of a random home burst into flames.
The implication is that when we examine the human condition too tightly — say, perhaps, through heavy surveillance — it’s gonna backfire. Take the recent news that Google, which pledged in 2018 not to use its artificial intelligence technology to develop weapons or surveillance systems in response to internal protests over the company’s work on a U.S. military drone program, revoked that promise last week following Trump’s return to office. There’s more at stake than a bad review from Chat GPT.
But Koval’s artistic focus is on the existential threat not to actual human lives, but to our species’ sense of self. That’s expressed through her regurgitation of machine-seized photos of homes, empty streets, pedestrian-packed cross walks, and sleeping women — all cinematically defined by grainy, high-angle, downward-focused shots — using an ancient art form.
The paintings provide us the physical comfort of witnessing another person’s creative outlook. But if we stare too long we get taken down the deep road of low-resolution, where Koval’s burlap-pointillism can be compared to isolated building blocks like pixels or atoms, synonyms for emotive anonymity. There’s a latent trypophobia in the approach.
By studying surveillance images, is Koval really seeing her subjects? That’s the question raised, ironically, by Chat GPT.
AI can’t feel the discomfort Koval seeks to impart. But it can articulate the threat of observation without true recognition. Koval’s works acknowledge the new waters of imagery we’re all wading through — or, as she more aptly puts it: “Like the French Impressionists of the 19th century or the early German Expressionists of the 20th – both groups whose members frequently painted street life as a distillation of their view on modernity – I’m trying to capture the digital highways we promenade through now.”
There’s an eeriness in the almost-human, but there’s also beauty in familiarity. Koval doesn’t necessarily show us a new way of seeing the world, but rather takes ownership over the absentee style of surveillance technology — using nothing more than some oil paints and burlap bags.
