The Uncanny Valley

Jenny Orchard and Mish Meijers

 

The Uncanny Valley

Jenny Orchard and Mish Meijers

Opening Wednesday 3 August 5.30pm

3 August – 31 August 2016

 

Despard is proud to present Hobart based artist Mish Meijers and renowned Sydney based artist Jenny Orchard, represented by Despard for twenty five years, putting together a visual treat; The Uncanny Valley.

Mish Meijers is an interdisciplinary artist using installation, sculpture, drawing, digital media, and performance,  what ever mediums that she thinks will translate and communicate.

Jenny Orchard is among the best known ceramic artists in the country, whose distinctive vibrant figurative works are represented in most public collections nationally. Jenny is completing her phd which is based around ‘The Happy Valley’ we look forward to this new visual phase of her career.

“The name Uncanny Valley seemed just right for this show of my work with Mish Meijers. Her wild and eerie creatures evoke the uncanny, or unheimlich as the Freudian term has it. Her work seems to grasp at the same fundamental questions as those I pursue,- “what is it to be human” and “as sentient creatures what binds us , and what divides us. The term ‘Uncanny Valley’ was originally used by a robotics professor Masahiro Mori, he was trying to understand and identify the point at which a robotic figure would come too close to being human and therefore create a feeling of revulsion rather than empathy. The work in this show may attempt to look at the uncanny or unheimliche from another position though, in that the creatures are asking how far from the human form can we travel and still retain empathy, or a comforting sensation of the familiar. Deliberately creating pareidolia, the tendency we have to see the man in the moon, or faces in rock formations, may cause us to consider we are all part of the moon and stars. Ceramic is a perfect medium for creating evocative creatures. It is the earth, like the Golem, we want to imagine these beings come alive. I often call them “inter beings” inanimate matter, given life and meaning by the viewer, and crossing boundaries of gender, life forms, plant, bacterial and mystical.” Jenny Orchard, June 2016

Review of The Uncanny Valley in Art Guide Australia by Briony Downes, direct link here: The Uncanny Valley – Art Guide Australia

 

Jenny Orchard – ceramics…

Jenny Orchard – collages…

Jenny Orchard – small watercolours…

 

Mish Meijers – ceramics…

Mish Meijers – paintings…

Mish Meijers – drawings…

The Uncanny Valley – Gallery views…