Spaced Punk Studios - Welcome to: Uncanny Valley

This exhibition was the most exciting part of my internship at CampSITE Social Sculpture Park, an art focused gallery, greenspace, and community centerpiece in Camp Washington. This was my first time curating a show, and I took the lead on the whole process, from ideation, to jurying, to layout and installation. I also coordinated events throughout the exhibition time, including an artist panel, and spent most of my time interacting with both the artists and viewers. I was extremely passionate about incorporating as many mediums as possible, which ended up including a live performance piece, as well as a small theater area to showcase several video works.

The theme was liminal spaces and the absurd, with a focus on artists within Camp Washington and the surrounding neighborhood, which included a lot of college students.

"A liminal space is a sort of in-between area – a place that both is and isn’t; after one time but before the next - and there is a sort of kinship that arises from how we experience them. Something is very human about that uncanny feeling we get from these places that are familiar enough to be recognizable, yet different enough, fundamentally wrong enough, that it is also unsettling. They create the sense that you shouldn’t be there, that this space was not made for you or for anyone else, even though you can’t quite articulate why. This, of course, creates a mood that can go hand-in-hand with the absurd. A place that is incorrect, that is everything and nothing, is a place where anything can happen, which can be frightening, but also somehow comedic. Perhaps it’s best to just embrace the absurdity of our world, to not just find it and experience it but create it for ourselves. Perhaps that’s what we’ve been doing for quite some time.

Welcome to Uncanny Valley."