Uncanny Tales
Alicia Adamerovich
Dominique Fung
Rebecca Ness
Phyllis Yao
Mark Zubrovich
Curated by
Hilary Doyle & Reid Hitt
HR Curating
DUMBO First Thursday event:
Thursday, February 7, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Opening: Saturday, February 9, 6:00 - 9:00pm
Exhibition Dates: February 7 - 24, 2019
AGENCY
20 Jay Street, Suite M14
Brooklyn NY 11201
Gallery hours: by appointment.
List of works
Press release
Rebecca Ness, Night Terror, Gouache and graphite on paper 8" x 8", 2016
Uncanny Tales
Curated by Hilary Doyle & Reid Hitt HR Curating
Alicia Adamerovich, Dominique Fung, Rebecca Ness, Phyllis Yao, and Mark Zubrovich
Historical art movements such as The New Objectivity and Magical Realism emerged out of fraught times of oppression and fascism. Artists of these movements portrayed reality as exaggerated, strange, and surreal to reflect times of anxiety, instability, and fear. During World War I, artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz witnessed the atrocities of war and later oppression under the Nazis. The only way to truly capture “the real” horror and bizarreness of everyday life was to depict reality as an uncanny combination of the cartoon and the real. Cartoons are direct, raw caricatures of what is seen, whereas realism is a ruthless, critical, and vivid depiction.
In Madeline Albright's book Fascism: A Warning, she notes that the two most-searched words in an online dictionary after the election were “surrealism” and “fascism.” People are trying to find words to explain the incongruous, unreal events of our time. Freud's Essay on the Uncanny describes the horror and strange fear experienced in the everyday. We feel helplessness experienced in an increasingly traumatic and unstable world. As our basic human rights are threatened, these artists create eerie and fantastical worlds that reflect our lives today. How can artists express our humanity as forces erode reality and truth?
This exhibition presents new figurative painting that hybridizes the uncanny with caricature, exaggeration, and invented mythologies. The artists included in this show have discovered new worlds that reveal anxiety, mystery, and eeriness that reflect our current state of political unrest.