CURATORIAL STATEMENT
We are everywhere faced with reconfigured landscapes. Noah Becker has confronted the artificial composition of the places around us with a series of works that defamiliarize everyday objects. Inspired by installations, hybridized with garden arrangement, the landscape painting is radically reimagined in Visions of Uncanny Valley. High horizon lines immerse onlookers in surreal collections of figures torn from their usual contexts, deconfigured, and integrated into a new experience. Rather than representing a scene that could be captured by the photographer’s lens, Becker has filtered these objects through his own experiential sieve to present a new kind of experience in these carefully crafted landscapes. The process of deconfiguration strips objects of their familiar associations, allowing fresh juxtapositions to lead viewers to surprising new interpretations of both content and form.
While traditional landscape painting takes the natural world as its object, the gardens Becker cultivates are inspired by art installations that invade galleries with objects whose artistry is revealed through recontextualization. The gardens cultivated in Becker’s paintings offer visions of landscapes curated to evoke a mood rather than immediately identifiable figures. Even Becker’s own self-portraits appear as visitations to these strange, defamiliarized territories. Though certain figures might appear sensible in isolation, their integration into an alien landscape draws that sensibility into question. Deconfigured from the natural world, integrated into an invented space, the depictions transgress the boundaries of typical orders. The rural and the urban meet in graffitied rock gardens bedecked in car parts, park benches, trees, bushes, and beaches where unusual anatomies lurk. Visitors to these spaces are met with a synthesis of nature and artifice. New configurations evoke unsuspected moods across a range of color palettes, moving from muted, somber, greys, to more vibrant, neon blues and purple.
Becker’s work is engaged in a deep dialogue with several movements in contemporary art that serves as inspiration even as they are surpassed. The result is an arresting new constellation of paintings that reflect this historical moment, while gesturing toward art still to come.
ARTIST STATEMENT
At one point in my career, I ran out of ideas. I wasn’t sure how to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in painting. Rather than rely on a narrative approach, I decided to make my work about nothing. When you look at famous paintings - what are they about? It was interesting to me that the most famous paintings have an unsolved mystery around them. The most stereotypical example is the Mona Lisa and its mysterious smile. But the only way that I could manage to create this kind of mystery in my own work, was to not know what it was about myself. I am the artist but also a participant in an unsolved mystery about my own works. So I made it about nothing - but a strong nothing. Through this nothing - something happens. Through this realization, my paintings become mysterious to me and everyone who looks at them. But at the same time they are infused with meaning. Not obvious meaning - the way an illustration has meaning - but meaning the way great art has meaning. It’s meaning that trickles out of the work over time and allows viewers and scholars more than one visit to decode and experience my art.