David Krut Projects | Natalie Paneng 'Uncanny Valley'

Natalie Paneng’s interest in the Uncanny Valley lies in its potential to raise eerie, suspecting sensations; where worlds are blended and limitless. The term Uncanny Vallery was coined by roboticist, Masahito Mori in the 1970s, to describe the discomfort that arises the interaction with things that are recognisably human but undoubtably, a little bit off. For Paneng, an artist who primarily works in the digital space, it seems natural to be curious about the interim of processing digital information and the ‘real’ - this curiosity has led her to lean into the theme of uncanniness as a prompt to create dreamscapes where the context and the ‘happening’ blend into surrealist loops. The artist motivates her intentions of place-making by creating, “[a space] where the thread of connection and memory is present but the are many levels of blurred accuracy and more than one gravitational force at play.”

Through these images, Paneng has created dreamscapes in which all energy is suspended. There is a light tension between the figures and their context; the characters seemingly floating through the artist’s checkerboard playground. Although brought to life through Paneng’s presence and performance, her characters are primarily fictional vessels that express a confident imagination, encouraging viewers to indulge in fairy-like feelings of whimsy and naivety. She returns to the freedom of the inner child through her world building, intending to share this energy with the viewer while also using her process as a reflective act on self-navigation.

In her exploration of the Uncanny Valley, the artist has also crafted a unique blend of digital and traditional/tangible mediums. In doing so, creating a new sense of the uncanny by integrating digital aspects into her unique printed works; by using pronto lithography and leveraging the graphic quality of linocut, she has removed an element of the handmade quality typically associated with printmaking. Simultaneously, the precision and control inherent in digital making is also diminished. This results in artworks that reside in the valley between the digital and the real, evoking the suspicious effect originally described by Mori.

The duplication of figures and iterative compositions enhance the sense of the uncanny. With heads floating like balloons and figures mimicking the hands of a clock, each new position drives the figures further away from their human essence. This inaccuracy connects the works to surrealist dreamscapes, where each element challenges the reliability of our consciousness.

This show runs from 24 June 2024 - 10 August 2024.