The Chair That Wants a Laugh

The strangest thing about the objects in “Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley” is how familiar they almost are. Almost a vase. Almost furniture. Almost an animal. Almost a body. Almost functional. Almost alive. Throughout the Blanton Museum of Art’s retrospective of Austin-raised twins Nikolai and Simon Haas, familiar things keep appearing, only to misbehave.

That misbehavior has been years in the making. Spanning roughly 15 years, “Uncanny Valley” follows the brothers from their beginnings in design and furniture through work in ceramics, textiles, beadwork, bronze, glass, digital media, painting, and sculpture. During a press preview, the brothers described this trajectory less as a decision to cross from design into fine art than as a change in the questions they were asking. At first, it was how to make a comfortable, aesthetically pleasing chair. Then came a more intriguing problem: how to make a chair that makes someone laugh.

That small change had larger consequences. The brothers often begin with the promise of usefulness, but then they lead us somewhere else. A vessel still has an opening and a chair still offers a seat, but none work as they should. Their ceramic Accretions, for example, retain the basic vocabulary of a container, but thousands of applications of slip build exceptionally elaborate and fragile surfaces. You cannot casually grab them without risking their delicate surface, much less fill them with water and flowers. Father Partner (2017) hovers somewhere between vessel, bodily organ, and botanical growth. 

What is an object once it no longer functions as expected? What else can it do? If a chair makes us laugh, has it really failed? She’s So Ducky (2018) is built from carved walnut, lush red velvet, and lighting components; it retains furniture-like legs, a seat-shaped body, and two long stalks rising like the eyes of a cartoon creature. But its function has somehow changed into a joke. A key at the creature’s bottom lights up its stalks, and its tongue can be pulled out from its mouth and used as a cushion. Here, the chair’s practical features become opportunities for play and interaction. Function, even if it doesn’t completely disappear, is multiplied. The more critical question here is who gets to decide what counts as useful in the first place.

Labor complicates the question of use further. Around 30 people in Central California worked for approximately a year just on the beadwork for The Strawberry Tree (2024), a blue, improbable canopy of large forms that stands on a massive piece of polished Pele de Tigre marble. Laborious stonework, assembly, transportation, and design, on top of the beadwork and years spent developing the bead system, all come together in a fantastical object whose playfulness conceals an enormous accumulation of work. As these objects move away from conventional usefulness, the labor required to make them can become extraordinary and difficult to sustain. 

Again and again during the preview, a version of the same declaration surfaced: “We don’t make these anymore.” Time, skilled labor, physical strain, ethical concerns, material unpredictability, and cost can accumulate, the brothers said, until a process is no longer worth continuing. Surprisingly, “Uncanny Valley” offers more than an archive of strange objects. It is a retrospective of exhausted, abandoned, modified, and superseded modes of production.

The exhibition title is borrowed from robotics; “uncanny valley” refers to our discomfort when something nonhuman gets disturbingly close to appearing human. The brothers connect this idea to their furry sculptures and to our tendency to attribute particular personalities and emotions to them. These creatures leave plenty of room for projection: A tilt of the body or the way two forms lean toward one another can start to look like affection, anxiety, confrontation, or desire. The emotion is not necessarily in the object; we as audiences supply it. Extending beyond the distinction between human and nonhuman things, the exhibition keeps us in a state of both recognition and uncertainty, where knowing that something resembles a familiar object does not necessarily tell us what it is for.

The artists themselves also don’t entirely decide what these objects become. Instead, they set the conditions for unpredictable results, a process they call “emergence.” Temperature, viscosity, and chance alter the repeated gestures that shape their ceramics. Gravity causes the paint to drip on their canvas. They write code in order to generate images that constantly change but never repeat. The artists initiate the process, but do not fully determine its outcome. 

This gives their objects a peculiar autonomy. That’s why the things populating “Uncanny Valley” feel so oddly alive. Furniture becomes creaturely, animals refuse identifiable species, and function sometimes survives only as a joke. Instead of quietly serving us, these objects become fragile, funny, excessive, and difficult to name. They are stubbornly themselves: disobedient designs and unruly outcomes.

This article appears in October 2 • 2026.