Unearthly, enigmatic, and psychologically tense, the works in NMWA’s newest exhibition, Uncanny, give form to women artists’ powerful expressions of existential unease. Artists subvert gender stereotypes and explore feminist issues through disquieting spaces, fantastical figures, and technology that appears eerily human. With nearly seventy works spanning painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and video, Uncanny is organized around themes of surreal imaginings, unsafe spaces, and the uncanny valley.
In this blog series, curator Orin Zahra dives deep into the exhibition’s themes and artworks. Read on to learn more, and plan your visit to experience Uncanny in person.
Uncharted Territory
A concept first described by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 and popularized in an essay by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the “uncanny” is the psychological experience of a phenomenon that is strangely familiar, yet alien, engendering a sense of anxiety. While artists and art historians have revisited the uncanny throughout the decades, this exhibition uncovers women’s authorship of uncanny narratives, revealing how the concept is used by women artists to regain agency and probe feelings of revulsion, fear, and discomfort.
Recent scholarship by art historian Alexandra M. Kokoli, author of The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016) interrogates the complex relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and feminism. Freud believed that the experience of the uncanny was triggered by a person’s sudden recollection of repressed impulses or memories, leading to feelings of dread. For Kokoli, the feminist uncanny is an aggressive defamiliarization of familiar, long-held preconceptions. Through subversive representations of repressed feelings or ideas, the feminist uncanny points to the unsettling goal of resistance and liberation inherent in feminist artistic practices.
Surreal Imaginings
The Surrealists of the early 20th century were among the earliest to explore the concept of the uncanny expressly in their art. In exploring themes of identity, metamorphosis, and transformation in an ever-changing world, Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) created playful, yet sometimes inhospitable realms. In her sculpture Ship of Cranes (2010), menacing birds with elongated, piercing beaks glide ominously in a bird-boat hybrid. Some scholars see Carrington’s depictions of boat travel as a reflection of her interest in concepts of rebirth and the afterlife from ancient mythologies.
Male Surrealists frequently represented the fragmentation and dissolution of female bodies; women artists reclaimed and co-opted this trope to grapple with their own frustrations and traumas. Untitled (with foot) (1989) by Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), carved from pink marble, depicts a baby’s foot sticking out from beneath a perfect sphere. Sculpted to allude to smooth, tender flesh under a heavy globe-like object, the work is equally alluring and alarming. Bourgeois evokes the unresolved tension of the universal trauma of birth, a recurrent theme in her art.
Continuing the legacies of the early Surrealists, contemporary artists create images and figures that reveal uncharted territories of the human psyche. Surreal photographic collages of Black figures by Frida Orupabo (b. 1986) employ a colonial photographic archive, while the fragmented, distorted, and multiplied bodies generate a strange, phantom-like effect. The imagery in Two Heads (2022) recalls pseudo-scientific photographs disseminated in colonial-era Europe that perpetuated stereotypes of African peoples. Orupabo critiques the historical racism and injustice perpetrated particularly against Black women. As the artist states, “For me, to create work that looks back at the viewer is a way to refuse to be made into an object, and to say, ‘I see you.’”