Me and my balloon-shaped head

She’s here, she’s there, she’s everywhere: a glum face premised like a hydrogen-filled balloon, Banksy-like against a flat printed background, a string mooring it to a hand. This face is a cog in a repeat design which operates like a pattern, a kaleidoscope, a cipher into a different understanding of what matters. This is Natalie Paneng and her solo exhibition, Uncanny Valley in the Blue House, at David Krut Projects in Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North.

The exhibition is couched in in-house gallery jokes about perspective and registering of plates in images that are esoteric to the outsider, and not altogether developed aesthetically, but give them a chance. Once you have climbed into the artist’s head space by spending time in the presence of the works, you become privy to a curious understanding of the possibilities of analogue printmaking in the hands of a young artist.

Born in 1996 and holding qualifications and experiences which have taken her from drama to aesthetics, Paneng describes herself as a digital artist who is used to making things happen with the twitch of a mouse or the tweak of a piece of software. Here, she’s dirtying her hands and filling the dustbin with the detritus of lithography and linocut, allowing the error margins of ink on paper to sit side-by-side with holograms and digital tricks. The intaglio techniques of blind embossing and Chine collé have as much of a presence on the paper as does the high definition of digital lines.

In this body of work, the play of values between the notion of Silicon Valley and that of the Uncanny Valley, floods the space. The former is an American construct that came to life in Northern California in the early 1970s at the time when hi-tech possibilities were being hatched in the world as a pathway to a future. The latter is a Japanese understanding of the schism between real and computer-generated resemblance, first coined in the late 1970s in tandem with the birth of robotics.

In thinking about the nascence of artificial intelligence, Paneng, a self-professed artist firmly moored in digitalia, plays with what she deems “dreamscapes”. And while on paper you might reflect on her as some kind of a narcissist, who uses her own image a million times as a central icon, when you look at that face, it’s not a ballsy confident one. It’s a direct gaze and a pensive one, as serene as a mask from antiquity as it ghoulishly floats through her compositions, messing with your understanding of what is space, what is pattern and what is Paneng’s selfie. If you recall the use of the self as a repeatable image in Steven Cohen’s early works on fabric, you get an understanding of the eerie sense of whimsy rather than sheer self-adulation that Paneng is developing.

The titles of these pieces evoke the work of SA-born, world resident contemporary choreographer Robyn Orlin as they dismiss concepts of word count and touch the outer membranes of sheer poetry. Given the manner in which this body of work on paper, video and installation establish a lexicon of approach for Paneng’s ideas, sometimes the potency of the titles overrides the visuality of the works they name. They’re about dreams and obstacle courses, castles in the world and in the sky (and also in sand, by implication).

The uncanniness of the images is compromised by a palette that lacks tonal contrast, comprising primarily hot pink and electric green, and a sparsity of distinct imagery. Furthermore, the warping of unframed works on the wall wilt the freshness of the ideas and make them seem amateurish. But don’t hold this against Paneng: she’s young. She’s unafraid to pose the oft terrifying “what if?” question to her working methodology and she yields a body of work which is exploratory rather than hard-boiled. However, the pricing of the work is less than modest.

You yearn to see Paneng’s clock-resonant image, which is about TikTok as much as it is about a teller of time, do more than just be a picture. You want her tightly formatted tiny images of herself in a checkerboard dress, to expand and distort kaleidoscopically.

As the marketed reason you should visit the David Krut Project Space, this exhibition is less of an aesthetic charmer than its surrounds, alas. The intricate gardens, the building and the fabulous book shop collectively speak of a deep investment into what makes a space tick with life, beauty and untold secrets. Uncanny Valley sits uncomfortably in this splendour.

This has as much to do with the works themselves as with their sizes and how they are hung in the small gallery space. With all their experimental robustness, they kowtow to the room’s confines and do not make you feel as though you could fall into their out-of-this-world provocations. The nature of the images is potentially monumental, but they are not imbued with that overweening quality that would make you step back in fear, draw you in or leave you shell-shocked and dizzy. They should.

Uncanny Valley is in the Blue House at David Krut Projects in Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, until August 10.