Margaret Koval’s urban landscapes are informed by her parallel career in multi-media production, broadcast journalism and documentary film. Works are often based on footage from public surveillance cameras – an archive of source material that she chose with the eye of a television news producer for its unmediated window onto contemporary life. The source is identifiable by high-angle perspectives, grainy resolution, obscured views – and all the anxiety subliminally associated with a ‘surveillance gaze.’ Light plays a central role but it tends to droop and ooze rather than illuminate. Narratives are indeterminate. Ambiguity and instability are major themes.
Central to these works, however, is the act of looking, itself, and the idea that digital channels have replaced the street scenes of 19th and 20th century art as windows onto contemporaneity – and as the most public public space for self-presentation and social observation. In other words, the subject of Koval’s street scenes is as much the acts of recording and watching as it is the action unfolding on the ground. The watcher is at least as important as the watched.
That inversion of subjectivity extends across Koval’s practice and applies equally to her paintings that don’t draw on surveillance technology. Koval’s streetscapes, for example, are disarmingly quotidian, at first. They frequently show depopulated, urban and suburban settings seen from peculiar perspectives under weird light. Often, they’re liminal spaces – waiting rooms, empty parks, roadways. There’s the sense that time is suspended. When houses are featured, the structures appear slightly off. Like somebody’s rearranged the furniture overnight. The homes represent familiar, American architectural styles – with hedges and flowerbeds designed to convey security -- but they have blank expressions. There’s a sense that they’re watching us. We the gazer, therefore, are very much in frame.
This sense of instability is both embodied and underscored by the paintings’ unusual physical presence and singular technique. Koval works on loose-weave linen. She applies her paint to the back of the surface, forcing it through the coarse mesh. What extrudes out the front appears as loops of yarn or strands colored threads. When the strands are long, the front surface can look like a rug. When they’re shorter, it looks like a needlepoint or tapestry. Or, when certain optical conditions are met, the extruded paint can look like dots of light – like the pixels of a digital image.
The slippage between media is intentionally uncanny – and in service of her overall vision: there is no terra firma here. It's an off-kilter world. While faintly unsettling, the effect simultaneously offers visual excitement. Koval often leans on the cinematographic toolkit she developed as a documentary filmmaker for the framing and lighting of her pieces. But her painterliness is equally on view. Her strands of colors sometimes hover over surfaces stained in complementary or analogous hues to create optically complex paintings. At times, they can vibrate like a flickering video screen. At times, they feel as comforting as a home-sewn sampler – or as traditional as a Persian carpet.