Margaret Koval’s work is largely about uncertainty and instability. Light plays a central role… but it droops and oozes more than illuminates. Her scenes are often borrowed from CCTV stills because the artist finds surveillance pictures pre-packed with a range of signifiers. Their typically high-angle viewpoint triggers anticipation of an impending event, usually a crime. Paranoia, anxiety, and voyeurism are thus close to the surface. Watching other people on a surveillance feed prompts the nagging question: If I can see them, who can see me? And most importantly for her purposes, CCTV’s digital format virtually incarnates the persistence of cognitive and material indeterminacy despite all efforts to dispel them. CCTV is intended to establish truth. But the digitally compressed images can be stubbornly ambiguous – especially when frozen and enlarged. The closer you look, the less you see. And hard as you try to construct a definitive narrative, you’re almost always confronted by the possibility of other narratives. Is the runner caught on camera a late-night jogger… or a fleeing thief? Are the walking man and woman an ordinary couple… or a killer and his guileless victim?

Koval’s pictures try to physically embody their themes, as well. The pixels of her digital source material are often rendered with thread-like strands of translucent oil paint. Scenes are readable from a distance but dissolve upon closer inspection. From that proximity, the manual effort behind the extruded paint is palpable. And the work’s overall presence appears slightly uncanny, seeming to straddle several categories at once. They are paintings with the dimensionality of sculptural relief, the refractive quality of stained glass, and the surface texture of tapestry or thread-worn carpet. They have been described as sumptuously appealing and uncomfortably corpuscular, at the same time. The shape shifting has a purpose: the works seek to stand as a reminder that neither states of being nor states of mind are constant or fully communicable.