The confronting beginning of UNCANNY VALLEY GIRL presages a work which startles slowly at every turn in its meditation of theme. Described in the Artist’s Statement as exploring “what pleasures and horrors can be imagined in the void.” The huge studio a Carriageworks is the perfect void in which to explore the emptiness. During the 60 minutes of the performance the space will be haunted by woman, machine, both. Including the exploring in shadow, in the half and half and half of a strobe.
The imagery is stunning and placed with a lyrical development of text to immerse the viewer in incarnations of complexity of machine and of woman. The woman, choked, with balls spewing out. Her dynamism is the bounce of colour exploding from her to collapse her prone, spent, inspiring the backwards pull of dead body.
From Lead Artist & Performer Angela Goh, Composer Corin Ileto and Writer Holly Childs UNCANNY VALLEY GIRL melds dance, visuals, mechanics, the glare of audience lighting and audio in a tour-de-force performance which makes direct contact with the eyes of the audience. The body is naked until the strut and stride of sensible boots and the tightness of the costume jeans form the crawling woman of doggie style mount. The body is often physically disrupted and in one of the exquisitely placed sequences, the uncanny valley girl, in short belted skirt, astrides as a colossus to stare and scare and dare the front row.
The artist uses some mechanised items to enrich the work. In one sequence she takes back the massaging, watching thing which has overtaken her in a heave of half light. Hers is the strength to bear and lay the burden down.
With metaphor and a unique vision, Goh will literally reclaim the power and shape the cable by force of will and skill, into new circular, feminine orgasmic shapes, eschewing the linear explosion of the male of the gaze.
UNCANNY VALLEY GIRL is an uncompromising consideration of rising machine, rising woman and the primality of the fear that brings.
UNCANNY VALLEY GIRL as part of Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art at Carriageworks.