Uncanny Valley

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Cat Auburn Rest Cure (detail) 2009. Mixed media. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ken Stewart

Arie Hellendoorn Portrait Woman (detail). Oil on jute. Reproduced courtesy of the artist

Arie Hellendoorn Portrait Woman. Oil on jute. Reproduced courtesy of the artist

Cat Auburn Rest Cure 2009. Mixed media. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ken Stewart

This exhibition is now closed

The fifth in the Gallery's emerging artists series, presenting new work by seven young New Zealand artists.

Uncanny Valley, the fifth in the Gallery's emerging artists series, presents new work by seven young New Zealand artists.

The title, from Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny, describes the gap between familiar living things and familiar inanimate representations. The uncanny (or Unheimliche – literally ‘un-homely') is a Freudian concept relating to the paradoxical experience of encountering something that is both familiar and uncomfortably strange.

By using ordinary subject matter to create imagery edged with melancholy, otherness and abjection, these artists challenge preconceived notions of the everyday, revealing it to be a potentially threatening but wondrous experience.