BmoreArt

In this exhibition, American artist Laurie Simmons utilizes ventriloquist dummies to resoundingly creepy effect in a photograph called “The Music of Regret IV” where five male dummies surround a smiling female dummy whose body fades into the shadows. The male dummies are clothed in a range of social class attire from blue collared to tuxedoed, but they all bear strangely threatening perma-grins and their unblinking and relentless male gaze is cast down upon the female dummy from all directions.  

In the same gallery, an entire wall is filled with portraits of identical twins by photographer Mary Ellen Mark who aims to transform these real people into something uncanny by dressing them in identical clothes in posed scenes, including two old women smoking cigarettes who are standing so close together they look like they could be conjoined. 

I have an identical twin brother, so I found the series more manipulative than meaningful. Would these twins seem so creepy if they weren’t wearing the same clothes while doing the same thing and staring blankly at the viewer? It just felt too cheap and easy. 

Dutch photographer Margi Geerlinks has the most unnerving work in the exhibition titled “Pinocchio” that could serve as the promotional poster for a dystopian sci-fi film. A nude boy (or girl?) with cropped hair lies on a polished medical table with his body abruptly ending at the waist where a studious white-haired man is stitching more skin together through an old-fashioned sewing machine. It’s unclear if the wide-eyed child is alive and just waiting for his completion or if this humanoid robot still needs to have a lifegiving switch flipped.  

Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis’ photograph called “Follow the Drinking Gourd” feels more tragic and mysterious with a black girl in a fancy dress sitting next to a doll house in an ornate wood-paneled drawing room. She is peering into a large doll house where a Confederate soldier doll armed with a rifle stands on the second floor above a white woman on the first floor and the shadowy outlines of two runaway enslaved people hiding in the basement. 

Both the girl and one of the enslaved people are holding a finger to their mouths in the “shhh” sign hoping to avoid detection by the personification of racism and hatred standing above them. The transformation of the chilling scene into a child’s game makes it even more unsettling as the horrors of history have been scrubbed and depersonalized. 

I was sitting in a café in Alexandria recently when I saw a truck drive by with a large sign promoting this exhibition, a new marketing maneuver to widen the net for museum goers. The sign featured British artist Gillian Wearing’s “Self-Portrait,” a photograph where she is wearing a very realistic silicone mask of her own face. She looks like a finely crafted mannequin, but then you notice her real eyes staring through the mask’s eye holes and nostril openings so she can breathe since the silicone mouth is sealed shut, concealing both speech and emotions. She is trapped behind the masks that we wear to fit in, to be loved, to be desired, or to be accepted. 

Wearing is known for wearing masks of her own face in different poses representing members of her family or famous paintings. The exhibition also includes portraits of herself as her own sister, Mona Lisa, and Albrecht Durer. 

It’s a bold move for an exhibit to feature artwork that is actively intended to provoke anxiety or uneasiness. Uncanny offers the diametric opposite of people pleasers like Monet’s water lilies or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and this is where I’ll add “but in a good way.” 

Art is above all else a representation of life and its myriad messy, joyous, contradictory, beautiful, frightening, elusive, and anxious moments. And the uncanny, in the most expansive sense of the word, lives right there within us whether we want to acknowledge it or not.    

Uncanny is exhibiting February 28- August 10 at National Museum of Women in the Arts: 1250 New York Ave. NW Washington, DC 20005  

Featured artists include Sama Alshaibi, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Anna Gaskell, Margi Geerlinks, Martine Gutierrez, Ann Hamilton, Connie Imboden, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Justine Kurland, Mary Ellen Mark, Polly Morgan, Meret Oppenheim, Frida Orupabo, Marlo Pascual, Vesna Pavlović, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Julie Roberts, Shahzia Sikander, Laurie Simmons, Valeska Soares, Sheida Soleimani, Angela Strassheim, Mathilde ter Heijne, Janaina Tschäpe, Remedios Varo, Gillian Wearing, and Jane and Louise Wilson.

Header Image: Justine Kurland, Grassland Drifters, 2001; Chromogenic color print, 30 x 40 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection; © Justine Kurland, Courtesy of the artist Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York