Leave it to San Antonio’s Vidvad Scare to make sure we get a glut of spooky content right at the start of Halloween season.
Scare’s giving locals the heebie jeebies with his latest solo exhibition, “Pareidolia Nightmares.”
Pareidolia is a phenomenon in which people incorrectly perceive patterns or meaning in random or ambiguous stimuli, including everything from seeing shapes in clouds or Jesus on a piece of toast to hearing hidden messages in music played backwards. The phenomenon is often associated with seeing faces in inanimate objects, like the infamous Face on Mars.
Though painted portraits generally intend for the viewer to interpret the artist’s brushstrokes as a person’s likeness, Scare’s grotesque paintings test the limits of what we can still recognize as a human face — from The Hills Have Eyes-esque mutants to a feminine visage whose left half is melting down the canvas.
The show can be seen by appointment at Blue Star gallery Bear & Ink or toured online using the Matterport platform starting the evening of Friday, October 2.
Free, on view by appointment through November 1 or via Matterport digital tour, Bear & Ink, 1420 S. Alamo St. S204, bearandink.com.
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This article appears in Best of San Antonio 2020.
