The Uncanny Valley Collection

This series was conceptualized and created over the course of a full semester in 2021. It explores the theme of the uncanny valley, a Freudian concept that relates the idea of an object's human likeness to the emotional response that it elicits. An object resting in the uncanny valley typically almost – but not fully – resembles a human, and tends to evoke feelings of discomfort, fear, unease, or even revulsion. The first two pieces in this body of work operate as a means to explore this grey-area and how it functions. As the body of work grew the nature of the pieces expanded beyond the concept of the uncanny valley itself, and into exploring how it could be used as an artistic tool to create a nebulous, perception-bending space. The last two works aim to play on ideas of the mundane in combination with the extraordinary in an attempt to place the viewer in a space in which they feel both at ease and uneasy, they find the familiar made unfamiliar, and they experience a space removed from their perceived reality.