"Making strange is the essence of all art." - Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984)

Oliver Clegg, Zelda, 2021; Joseph Bolstad, Everywhere, 2021 & Nicholas Sardo, An Unsuccessful Attempt to Peer into the Past, 2021. Install: Sean Carroll.

In the exhibition’s eponym, the television series, Stranger Things, an ordinary town in an ordinary corner of America is anything but ordinary – the Freudian unconscious, dormant memories, and the uncanny play the leading role. Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as an experience that reminds us of earlier aspects of our unconscious life, a so-called ‘return of the repressed.’ More broadly, the uncanny is a psychological phenomenon where something is not simply mysterious, but rather unsettling in a strangely familiar way.

Artists such as Oliver Clegg and Andrea Smith take something familiar, a black cat and a water glass, respectively, and make it strange. There is something undeniably eerie in the unnaturally large smile of the cat in Clegg’s painting, Zelda, or the subtle reflection of Greek Orthodox icons in the water in Smith’s A Sign. In Wade Kramm’s Invisible Traffic Cone and Kim Beck’s Pothole Positives, every-day benign objects and phenomena become fetishized, made precious, but more importantly, make the most mundane strange and unfamiliar.

Exhibiting artists: Kim Beck (b. 1970); Joseph Bolstad (b. 1982); Oliver Clegg (b. 1980); Devra Fox (b. 1989); Jessica Goehring (b. 1983); Wade Kramm (b. 1979); Zhongkai Li (b. 1993); Jamie Mirabella (b. 1971); David Muenzer (b. 1987); Nicholas Sardo (b. 1994); Andrea Smith (b. 1992) and Rachel Youn (b. 1994).