One of our more savvy correspondents, Brook Barman, has written in to tip our eyes to the remarkable and remarkably moving and disturbing work of Ron Mueck. Barman writes: "i have been struggling to wrap my brain around this guy's work for months now and thought it might further tease your fetish for the almost-human...the guy's name is Run Mueck. he worked on a bunch of those perfectly wonderful 80's, pro-fantasy, anti-science films like Labrynth and Dark Crystal, before giving it all up to be maybe the most unnerving, if not most gifted sculptor ever. here are links to some of his pieces: one, two, and three."
If I were in a room with various sculptures as these, I would question my reality.
ReplyDeleteAfter class I went to the library and looked up Freud's work on "the
ReplyDeleteuncanny." Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to thoroughly disect it but I found a certain defination rather applicable to why Maria and this photographers work is uncanny.
"For the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression" he continues on to give another definition as provided by Shilling: "the uncanny is something which aught to have remained hidden but has come to light."
THIS is why Maria and these pictures are uncanny! As children we see dolls and these inanimate objects as being real, alive and often friends. As we age we
seperate the fiction of them being animate in our minds. Now, seeing
Maria, who is a HUGE doll who seems alive, upsets and disturbs our repressed feelings from childhood. The dissociation of these machines or puppets being alive throws our whole world into chaos because we question what really IS true. So something familiarly posotive in the past becomes frightening to us in the present.
I went to the Magritte exibit in LA and learning about this I realize WHY the life-like foot that was sticking out of the wall was so uncanny. Because not only is it dissociated from my own connection in my mind of a foot being connected to a human, it makes me question whether or not it is real or inanimate.
- amy ebersole
This sculpture is incredible. The boys eyes are so deep;they encourage the viewer to get lost in them.
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