Monday, 14 November 2011

Are keys uncanny?


The aim here was to create an uncanny feeling through the juxtaposition of seemingly normal objects. With many objects this may not have worked, but i feel there is something particularily uncanny about keys. Following my previous work using spinning keys i have found by studying them over and over i have found something quite unnerving about them. In many other contexts keys have been used in an uncanny, or even surreal, way. In the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland the ideas of keys is used to an uncanny effect by focusing on scale. But perhaps the uncannyness of keys comes from not knowing what is within whatever is opened by the key, rather than the actual key itself? An example of this tension is very clear in Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's 'Meshes of the Afternoon' (1943), a still from which is pictured below.


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