Allan Linder: The Uncanny Exhibition at The Chateau Gallery

The Chateau Gallery

A Chateau contemporary art gallery set in the heart of Louisville, Kentucky’s Historic Old Louisville Preservation District.

1230 S 3rd Street Louisville, Kentucky 40203

The Chateau Gallery

Set in the heart of Louisville, Kentucky’s Historic Old Louisville Historic Preservation District, The Chateau Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a narrative as captivating as the artwork housed within its walls. The original structure, built on the tailwind of the Southern Exhibition, is one of the first Gilded Age mansions constructed on Third Street's Millionaire's Row. The building's unique Chateau Victorian architecture lends credence to the gallery's name, known informally as “The Chateau.”

Throughout its many lives, the monolithic building served as the estate of a tobacco baron, a funeral parlor, an accredited barber college, a "dealer's palace;" and a law office. Today, The Chateau Gallery is an avant-garde colossus of brick, and mortar, wooden beams, and traditional white gallery walls — occupying a time and place between the antique and the contemporary.

Allan Linder's RELAX, 2021, 12 x 12, Pencil on paper, Artificial Intelligence, digital paint, and animation.

THE UNCANNY

When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, we call it uncanny. That is to say, when something almost satisfies our brain’s search for human likeness, but falls short by a small margin, we experience a characteristic sense of unease at the sight of it. This is our understanding of what it is about realistic androids and almost-perfect-but-not-quite CGI that makes our skin crawl, and it stems from Freudian theory surrounding the German word “unheimlich.” Freud tells us that the unheimlich, or unhomely, is our experience when confronted with something that is like home to us but is made wrong somehow. How do you incorporate the unheimlich, or uncanny, into your artwork? Does your work illicit a visceral reaction from the viewer, or traverse the boundary between perfect and imperfect human likeness?

December 15th, 2021 - February 15th, 2022

Artists:

Allan Linder, Anna Nichol Stutsman, Annika Ringle, Anya Benninger, Ben Schoenkase, Casey Wolhar, Carol Blum, Claudia Six, Charles Seaton, Dasha Pears, Denise Ayers, David Miller, DeShaun Walker, Dida Papalexandrou, Don Bergland, Diane Morley, Elzbieta Zdunek, Hector Acuna, Jane Zich, John Marshall, Frank Boyce, Kevin Kemp, Lena Meszaros, Paula Rozov, Loriza LePore, Ronald Gonzalez, Samantha Friday, Sheng Lin, Theresa Moriarty, Timea Mitroi, Vitalii Panasiuk, William Baez.

Bone Dust Collection

Linder's artwork can be described in two words, "weird and wonderful". It is a technology with a little bit of nostalgia thrown in.

Bone Dust is a collection of surreal thoughts and dreams hand drawn on paper. Using an artificial intelligence-generated image from the original drawing, the artist digitally paints using Salvador Dali’s color palette, blending the two styles together.

Bone Dust is that time of day when it’s not quite a day and it’s not quite the night. The transmutation of ideas, surreal dreams, everyday emotions, and feelings places the viewer on a speck of dust floating through a room. From the final piece of work, Linder animates over it creating surreal landscapes on top of human anatomy, challenging the imagination. Once the animation is complete, 20 to 100 animated cells are stacked, stabilized, and then flattened.