In Dialogue

The paintings in Margaret Koval’s latest exhibition, The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life, capture a sense of disorientation—recognizable urban and suburban scenes where something is slightly off. They are rich in color and composition, drawing viewers in with pleasing views, yet an underlying unease lingers. Like waking up to find someone has rearranged your furniture overnight, they create a feeling of estrangement within the familiar.
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Koval describes her paintings as psycho/social landscapes. Several works feature houses in familiar American architectural styles, framed by hedges and flowerbeds that evoke safety and order. But the houses themselves have blank expressions, neither inviting nor warm. This juxtaposition contributes to the unsettling effect she explores in her work. Her paintings raise deeper questions: Who lives here? Who are my neighbors? These inquiries reflect her broader sense of disequilibrium about national identity and group affiliations. In the following interview, Koval discusses the ideas behind The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life
Your oil paintings have an uncanny resemblance to needle crafts. What draws you there?
Well, the shape-shifting of my work is multivalent – the associations with various handicrafts open up a lot of doors for additional readings. But let me first flesh out what you’re describing. I work on a very loose-weave burlap. I apply my paint from the back of the canvas and press it through the fabric holes so it comes out the front looking like strands of yarn. When the strands are long, the front surface can look like a rug. When they’re shorter, it looks like a needlepoint or tapestry. Or, when certain optical conditions are met, the extruded paint can look like dots of light – like the pixels of a digital image. And since digital images are frequently my source material, the technique has a very practical purpose in some cases: to cue viewers that this is a representation of a photograph.
Gerhard Richter blurred his photo-realistic paintings so they looked like faded snapshots in the 1960s, introducing thoughts about remembrance and representation. I’m interested in something similar around the public archive of digital imagery that the world has accumulated over the last several decades. His questions were about unreliable images and the buried past (among other things). Mine are about our over-exposed, unstable present.
Another thing that draws me to this slippage between painting and needlecraft is the generalized destabilizing effect it has on the viewer. While people are deciphering the image they’re looking at, they’re also compelled to decipher the object they’re looking at. Things aren’t what they seem. So, for me, the technique is an ideal way to allude to the slippage of other kinds of certainties. It might even hint at disempowering some of the more dystopian aspects of contemporary digital culture. Surveillance, for example, has been one of my preoccupations over the years – first, police and government surveillance and increasingly self-surveillance, data surveillance, and a generalized surveillance culture. My invocation of needlecraft is a way of addressing anxieties around those sorts of things by domesticating them.

You are also a filmmaker. Besides resembling tapestries, your paintings evoke flickering video screens. How do you see the relationship between these practices?
Right. My technique can create some interesting visual effects, and one of them is the very subtle impression of flickering. I think it’s because the viewer’s eyes are trying to focus on the painting’s surface. But my paintings have two surfaces that are just a millimeter or two apart: there’s the burlap support, and then there’s the tips of the paint strands. As the eyes switch focus between them, the paintings can seem to flicker. If you perceive that, you might get the sense of rolling video, in addition to still photography.
I’ve spent many years of my life making television news productions and documentary films. The conventions of cinematic narrative are deeply embedded in me, as I think they are in most people. So I think that the whiff of rolling video in some of my paintings – even when the painting depicts something as naturally static as a house – might trigger the very human instinct to build a story around them. My imagery doesn’t tell a specific story, but the flickering effect implies there is a story, and the viewer takes it from there.

Let’s take a closer look at one painting in your show. What can you tell us more about the genesis, process, source material, and approach to color in this painting?
I’ll tell you a little about Yellow House. I painted it late last summer as the presidential campaign began heating up. I was driving home from my studio one night after working with surveillance images all day and I was just overwhelmed by the weirdness I felt in the current moment. Some bedrock assumptions about my identity as an American were dissolving. The geological phenomenon of liquefaction kept coming to mind. That’s the process where the shaking of the ground during an earthquake hits a frequency that can cause the subsoil to liquefy beneath buildings, and they sink. Kind of like the penultimate scene from the movie ‘Carrie’ when the Earth swallows her house.
I drove by a corner home that had its porch lights on and had some uplighting in the front yard. In my mood, it reminded me of the kind of uplighting used in horror films on the villain’s face. So I pulled onto the road verge and took a bunch of photos, trying to anthropomorphize the house. It felt very surveillance-y.
Back in my studio, I gave a lot of thought to creating that flicker. I decided to paint the burlap support a uniform Prussian blue. I thought the house should be a complimentary orange, but since you don’t see a lot of orange houses, I shifted along the color wheel one notch to an orange-yellow. I was conscious I wanted to make the house a uniform depth of paint so the yellow strands would create a consistent plane that hovers above the plane of Prussian blue. That’s what animates this painting. I should point out that photographs of the painting obviously flatten the two surfaces, so you can’t see the flicker in reproduction.
Tell us a bit about the ArtWRKD Gallery.
ArtWRKD opened in 2022 and has been a fantastic addition to the Philadelphia, PA, area art scene and the scenes of nearby NJ and New York. The founder, Ashara Shapiro, puts on innovative contemporary art shows and brings in the community with artist talks, workshops, and a range of immersive experiences that are both surprising and incredibly high-value. For example, she did a ‘wearable art fashion show’ in the gallery space during her exhibition of fiber art, which drew a rapturous crowd from all over the tri-state area. I feel incredibly lucky to have someone so expansive to collaborate with.

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Margaret Koval: The Uncanny Valley of Everyday Life at ArWRKD runs through February 23, 2025
About the Artist: Margaret Koval splits her time between Princeton, NJ and London, England. She earned her MA from the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2010, following studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) and the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. In addition to her artistic practice, Koval has an accomplished career as a multimedia producer, documentary filmmaker, and Emmy-winning broadcast journalist. Her independent films, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, have aired nationally on PBS. @kovalmargaret
About ArtWRKD: Transcending the conventional gallery model, Ashara Shapiro created ArtWRKD as a dynamic space where art serves as a catalyst for personal and community transformation. The gallery fosters dialogue, collaboration, and creative exploration while championing innovative art-making and providing an incubator space for curatorial and artistic experimentation. Shapiro’s vision, deeply rooted in a lifelong drive of curiosity and a commitment to bold, inclusive artistic expression, redefines what it means to be a community-centered gallery. By encouraging viewers to engage with art as a medium for reflection, societal critique, and transformation, ArtWRKD celebrates fresh perspectives and groundbreaking concepts that transcend the aesthetic to create meaningful connections within the creative community.
ArtWRKD is located at: 126-128 South State Street, Newtown, PA 18940