Uncanny Valley: David Altmejd’s “Vibrating Man” Solo Exhibition

Description

“A perfect object for me”, the artist has said, “is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time”.

In David Altmejd’s (b. 1974) sculptures of heads and body parts, decay exists in balance with regeneration, and uncannily realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur.

The heads have a hallucinatory quality to them: inverted heads, a head sprouting from another, a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope, faces which are gone or scooped out, gaping wounds revealing cavities of dazzling crystals or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, to name but a few.

Through the heady blend of magic and science, science fiction and gothic romanticism, the exhibition, entitled The Vibrating Man, is a realisation of the artist’s post-apocalyptic vision, which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.