Inside the Studio: Margaret Koval
- Art Dealer Street
- 5 days ago
- 12 min read
Margaret Koval paints the familiar until it starts to feel strange. Street corners, playgrounds, and quiet homes appear recognizable at first glance — then shift into something unsettled, as if the world has slipped slightly out of place.
Working from the visual language of surveillance and cinematic tension, she builds scenes that hover between comfort and threat. Up close, her images dissolve into granular fields; from a distance, they lock back into focus — echoing the way perception itself can wobble under pressure.
In this Inside the Studio conversation, Koval reflects on anxiety, ambiguity, material resistance, and the uncanny feeling of living through a cultural moment that seems to be dissolving and reforming in real time.
Read on to learn more in an exclusive interview with Margaret Koval :
Your paintings depict familiar American public spaces, yet they feel subtly off-kilter and unsettling. What draws you to these everyday environments, and how do you begin transforming something ordinary into something uncanny?
I’m trying to capture a sense of liquefaction — a sense that familiar structures are dissolving in place and our day-to-day experience of the world is in flux. That certainly describes my feelings when I survey the news every morning. It’s a profound discomfort about the politics of the moment, for sure, but also something bigger. It’s disorientation about the bend of time. I’ve made a number of documentary films and have spent many years reading and thinking about historic disruptions. I’ve often wondered what it felt like to live through something so epochal as the “fall of Rome” if you were an imperial subject — or to experience the first wave of Europeans as an Aztec or Incan, or to go through your daily motions during any pivot point in human history when the framework for your understanding of the world crumbled away — when cosmologies shift. That’s what I’m exploring.
So my images of familiar spaces in strange atmospherics are an effort to express a very subjective, quotidian, worm’s-eye view of our own “End Times,” however underpowered and simultaneously hyperbolic that may sound. When I use that phraseology, I’m not thinking of global Armageddon or the Second Coming — though our public dialogue often sounds like periods when those thoughts predominated. Rather, I’m thinking about the end of an era when, for the most part, people understood and shared the values and toolkits that so many of us grew up imagining were eternal. Losing that grounding is deeply unsettling. It has tossed me into a kind of “uncanny valley,” where the world still bears a surface resemblance to the place I thought I knew, but there’s something fundamentally alien about it, too.
You asked how I make the ordinary feel uncanny in my paintings. To begin with, I find myself groping toward visual and emotional dichotomies like disturbing beauty, familiar strangeness, unsettling comforts, threatening security, and so on. I want to hold contradictions like these together in the same painting because I’m trying to create tension. On the simplest level, I opt for images of almost exaggerated ordinariness — nondescript street corners, garden-variety playgrounds, neighborhood homes — then I try to dislodge them from normality with some classic cinematic tools. Sometimes it’s extreme uplighting or blanching security spots; sometimes voyeuristic angles of view. I usually present my scenes at dusk or early nightfall, when perception can play tricks on people. And I darken house interiors in a way that can suggest they are looking at you. I really enjoy leaning on these kinds of scary-movie tropes because they’re subconsciously familiar to almost everyone, and people easily become alert to the paintings’ hidden agendas without always knowing why.
These kinds of visual overtures often draw people closer. When they approach, they have another set of experiences. I construct my images from a grid of paint particles that reference the pixels of a digital photograph. And like photographs, my images often disintegrate into a bitmap of colors and values when you get near — only to resolve back into a clear composition from a distance. So the paintings shift in and out of focus depending on your proximity. This granular construction also lets me deploy the trick of optical mixing to create a color cast. A viewer will “see” violet, for example, when they stand back from the canvas, but will encounter dots of red and blue when they come near.
But the most powerful catalyst for an uncanny encounter, I think, comes from the physical presence of the paintings as a whole. I create the “grid of paint particles” that I just described by pushing oil pigment through the back of a loose-weave linen burlap. When it extrudes out the front, the paint either forms raised dots or longer strands that look like threads of yarn. The surface texture makes the image appear to be a tapestry, or needlepoint, or even a hook rug. Viewers are really sideswiped by that.
Surveillance imagery plays a strong role in your work — high vantage points, obscured views, harsh lighting. What does this “surveillance gaze” allow you to say about contemporary life that a more traditional perspective would not?
Yes, I started using surveillance imagery more than a decade ago, with source material originally pulled from police security cameras, for the most part. But I wasn’t trying to comment directly on crime or even on the abuse of state surveillance, per se — though that does really worry me. As you suggest, I was more interested in how the elements of a “surveillance gaze” capture something essential about contemporary life. For me, that is a pervasive sense of anxiety. In much the same way that the camera tropes used in horror movies prime the audience to be suspicious of the house on the hill, the conventions of the surveillance gaze trigger alertness, vigilance, or even apprehension. Most of us see surveillance footage as part of a crime investigation. So the grainy resolution, the wide framing, and the top-down viewing angle, among other things, pretty reliably telegraph danger. Also, people in the footage are invariably cast as victims or aggressors. That polarization, too, is a slice of contemporary culture that I like to both engage and undermine.
But the surveillance gaze does even more than open a window onto contemporary anxieties. You can’t have surveillance without a surveillor, so it puts the viewer in the frame as an invisible, implied co-star. The act of watching, in other words, is encoded into the images of people being watched. And that prompts a whole new set of thoughts about surveillance culture in the broadest sense — and people’s willingness to participate in it.
You apply oil paint from the back of loose-weave linen, pushing it through the fabric until it emerges as loops, strands, and fibers. How did this technique develop, and what does this physical resistance between image and material mean to you conceptually?
Yeah, this is what I began to describe a minute ago. Truthfully, I hit on the technique accidentally. I was working from surveillance footage and felt it was really important that the final painting retained the material markers of my source. So I was trying to develop a way to paint pixelated photographs without just daubing dots on the surface of the canvas. I found a nubby, cheap burlap and thought the texture might help. But the loose weave was so porous that I struggled to create a readable image. I decided to plaster the reverse side with some thick acrylic paint to give myself a pore-free surface to work on. It was a big canvas, so I walked around to the back and slathered away. When I returned to the front, I saw the paint had extruded through the burlap pores and come out the front as raised dots and threads, creating exactly what I was after — and more. I realized I could not only amplify the pixelated quality of digital photographs, but also create paintings that looked like tapestries or rugs. It was a real Eureka moment.
As I worked with the technique, I thought a lot about how the materiality of my shape-shifting paintings interacted with the images they carried to add new layers of resonance. This interface really energized me. For example, I could transform a surveillance photograph of a late-night pedestrian into something resembling a medieval tapestry… which might infuse the scene with an aura of historic authority or immutability. Or I could rematerialize an oddly depopulated cityscape into a thick-pile carpet… and introduce a sense of palliative comfort. As you suggest in your question, I find something really important in the tension, or the resistance, between what I’m showing — the image — and how it is constructed — the material process.
And, by the way, the process is hard. Pushing large quantities of paint through the back of a big canvas is very physical. The painting gets extremely heavy, awkward, and vulnerable at the same time. As one of my tutors used to say, the resulting image is “hard-won” — and I think viewers intuit that sometimes. Effort is part of the presence of the work. What I also hope viewers will intuit is that all these images of “ordinary” people and places are literally sieved or strained into being — with all the expected distortions and discomforts those verbs imply. The images emerge from the process as an extruded, granulated, disintegrated approximation of reality. The process of creating them sort of performs the tensions they depict. That’s an important fulcrum of my paintings when they’re working well.
Viewers often mistake your paintings for textiles — carpets, tapestries, or needlework — and feel an impulse to touch them. How important is this slippage between painting, photography, and craft in activating the viewer’s experience?
That’s a great question. It’s another one of the things I think about a lot. And the short answer is: it’s very important. I said at the beginning of our conversation that I’m trying to convey my own sense of liquefaction that comes from living inside the uncanny valley of our present moment. Viewers usually grasp the gist of that in successive waves. And the first wave is the paintings’ own uncanny presence. People stand for long minutes trying to figure out what they’re looking at. A needlepoint? A painting? Somebody once asked me if it was astroturf. Then they start making connections and asking questions. The first one is usually, “Can I touch?” They don’t trust their eyes, so they want to activate their other senses. I utterly love that. It creates an authentic sense of disorientation and opens the door to all the other ruminations that I want the paintings to prompt. High on the list are questions about authenticity: Can we trust our senses? What is real? How do we know?
Ambiguity and instability are central themes in your practice. Coming from a background in journalism and documentary film — fields often associated with truth and clarity — how did you arrive at ambiguity as a place of power rather than uncertainty?
Wow. Another great question. You’re right to think my years as a journalist and documentary filmmaker really shaped my painting. That background is obviously ingrained in my composition and lighting, but even more so in my skepticism about certainty. Truth and clarity are end goals, of course, but I think of them as elusive abstractions that can only be approached through their opposites — through uncertainty and questioning. I learned as a journalist that you always got the best material from people by staying wide open and asking “why?” over and over in hundreds of different ways. “Why” is truly a magic word for lowering people’s drawbridges. I guess my paintings are trying to activate that same questioning process in viewers. I hadn’t thought of it until you asked, but I want the “what?” that my viewers usually start asking to quickly become “Why? Why? Why?…” Their conjectures may be very different from what I’m thinking about when I make the work. I don’t mind that at all. In my mind, a work of art shouldn’t be a piece of propaganda or a policy statement. Other formats are better for that. Art performs lots of different functions, and one of the most compelling to me is an invitation to ruminate.
Many of your works feel narrative, yet the story is never fully revealed. How do you think about storytelling in your paintings, and what role does the viewer play in completing — or disrupting — the narrative?
I use unresolved narrative in the same way I use ambiguity: to provoke questions and engagement from the viewer. It gets them to invest in the work, if only for a few minutes. I have used documentary photography as source material for many of my paintings — whether it’s surveillance photography, something I found on the internet, or (increasingly) my own pictures. I definitely seek out images that suggest a before and after. But I rarely have any idea what that is. In fact, when I work with surveillance stills, I make a point of not learning the backstory because I don’t want to predetermine the meaning of the painting. For me, it is always about posing questions and never about delivering answers. Because I’m not trying to make paintings about issues or events or debates, I’m trying to make paintings that evoke visceral responses to very personal experiences — experiences with my paintings, ideally, but often with musings, emotions, or memories that my paintings might rekindle. This is pretty aspirational, but if and when it happens, it happens because the viewer has the freedom to complete the story in their own way.
You exhibited with Clio Art Fair in September 2025. How did presenting your work in that context — alongside independent and emerging voices — shape the way audiences engaged with your paintings?
I was impressed that the audiences who came to Clio were completely uninhibited about asking questions and offering opinions about the work on display. I had a lot of fantastic — and sometimes very long and deep — conversations that even continued by email months later. Personally, it gave me fantastic insights into how and why people respond to my work; in fact, much of what I’ve said so far about viewers came directly from conversations I had at Clio, and I think that openness definitely came from the fair’s atmosphere. People seemed drawn there exactly because the art and the artists were accessible to them. In part, I imagine that’s because Clio is on a smaller scale than fairs like Frieze or the Armory. But more importantly, I think it’s because emerging and independent artists are less intimidating than big-name gallery representatives. Whatever the reason, intense and frequent audience engagement was a real defining feature of Clio and a great joy.
Your work often reflects what you’ve described as a “liminal” cultural moment, shaped by digital saturation, surveillance, and image overload. As you look ahead, what questions or tensions feel most urgent for you to explore next through painting?
Yes. I said at the start of this conversation that I was trying to convey collective anxiety around the uncanny valley we all inhabit now and the “end times” we’re living through. But that’s only half the equation. The dissolution of one organizing cosmology usually comes hand in hand with the formation of another. We see it coming; we just don’t yet know whether it’s friend or foe. That’s what I mean by “liminality.” It’s that unrooted feeling of hovering between a receding past and a looming future — the dictionary definition being “a state of betwixt and between.” Technology has always been as much a part of that uncertain future as politics. I’m thinking about technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, facial-recognition surveillance, digital tracking, algorithmic news feeds, computer-generated images, synthetic people, and so on.
All of this makes the old police surveillance systems seem almost quaint. These technologies hold out enormous promise… but also challenge our capacity to know or trust anything with certainty — or even to marshal coherent questions. They compromise our ability to make informed voting decisions; to earn a living; to educate our children for the future; let alone to derive workable answers to millennia-old questions about living a good life. They’re head-spinners, to say the least.
My work so far has been exploring the gut reactions to these pressures — and the pressures of the political reconfigurations that travel alongside them — mostly through an outward gaze. I’ve been presenting the perspective of a viewer looking at the world, with a hint of the world looking back at the viewer. Now I’m beginning to explore a visual vocabulary that I hope will shift focus onto the viewer more unequivocally. I want to channel how this liminal period of history makes us feel, but also how its pressures are forming and deforming us as human beings and as citizens — even as we remain ambivalent about the costs and benefits.
I use the word “channel” on purpose. I’m not trying to explain or describe so much as to create a visceral connection with the viewer around a psychological state. So what might that look like? I’m working on a series of paintings of life-sized, contemporary caryatids — human pillars — that no longer hold anything up. To the contrary, they seem to be staying upright themselves only by leaning heavily against the grid of a chain-link fence. Their bodies, meanwhile, have already been subject to a finer-meshed grid: they’ve been sieved through the weave of the canvas — extruded into a threadworn presence that may, or may not, endure.
I plan to display these life-sized canvases in a configuration that funnels viewers into the center, compelling them to confront fence and sieve — and the hint of historic (in)significance — on equal footing with the caryatids.
That will keep me busy for a while.
Koval’s work doesn’t offer neat conclusions — it invites a slower kind of looking. The longer you stay with her paintings, the more they shift: image into texture, narrative into question, certainty into doubt.
What lingers is the tension she holds so carefully — between beauty and unease, surface and structure, the act of watching and being watched. Her paintings don’t just depict a world in flux; they make you feel that flux in your body, in your eyes, and in the space between distance and closeness.
You can learn more about Margaret Koval and her work via these links:
Website: Margaret Koval Instagram: @kovalmargaret