“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” is an artwork by Pam Valfer currently on view at Elevator Mondays. While there are at least four distinct elements to this artwork, I’ll consider it a single piece, even though the quotation marks indicate a show title as opposed to an artwork, which would instead appear in italics. This isn’t really important, except that I am interested in artworks which form into a singular vision when shown together, or that can be read “off of eachother” if you will—but from the perspective of the artist. This is the reason I only write about one and two-person shows; I am less interested in curatorial constructs, and more interested in artistic ones. The thing about Pam’s piece, so perfectly scaled, installed, and conceptualIzed, is that it simultaneously uses the construct of the gallery (an elevator, and a tiny one, at that) while seeming to shed all notions of curator or curatorial intervention. I suppose what I’m saying here is that while this show is incredibly “man-made,” or constructed, it retains subtly, but also unity; it’s a packaged experience.

If it seems that I’m being too vague, it’s because I’m trying to figure out how to describe what it’s like to enter Pam’s artwork, and why while you’re in there, a lightbulb goes off, and you’re just like, “this is an awesome artwork.” I rarely feel that way in the moment about an artwork—but it is the narrative construction of this piece, from beginning to end, that sets you up, builds you up, to a kind of climax, which ends as an anti-climax, and then the lightbulb moment. Okay, still too vague. Let’s walk through it.

If you’re like me, you read the Press Release for “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” for the show when you received the invitation. I got mine in an email, and since I am interested in Don’s gallery (I have shown there myself) and I am friendly with Pam (her husband and I were classmates in grad school), seeing the show was a no-brainer. I read the press release, which is sort of hard to describe—it’s several sentences interspersed with links, and excerpts of the content of those links, which are all in different fonts and sizes than the “sentence,” which pretends to be a traditional description by starting with “Pamela Valfer’s exhibition ‘Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions’ explores how mental rotation tasks.” In total, it’s six pages long. If you just read the press release, and you’re not in front of the actual artwork, it makes no fucking sense. I immediately responded to the invitation by asking if Pam had written this press release. The answer was yes. Okay, so we can agree, it’s really an artwork, not a press release; maybe it’s both.

I have evidence that it’s an artwork, and I will argue that because the printed press release, which exists in the gallery sitting area where the press releases usually are, includes the links, printed in color, it wants to stage itself as some kind of hyper-object, or at least a really weird contemporary paper/internet hybrid thing. Including a link before a quote is not a standard way of quoting or attributing—it implies a kind of narrative reading structure, it implies a path that the artist wants us to follow. Yes, it’s an awkward and difficult to read text mash-up, but it’s kind of an analog search path. Think of it like this. Let’s remove all the links. We end up with the following text:

Pamela Valfer’s exhibition “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” explores how mental rotation tasks can be affected by space, and sound. But what is the object that is being promoted? Stimulus is constantly being absorbed. We strain to see it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head. We become passive to see it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head. We believe it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head.

The links that appear interspersed in the original text are what we would presumably search for and click on, to make sense of the words and concepts being used to describe this art show. So at first it seems that Pam has laid the path she wants us to follow—to find the information she would want us to find. But, when you get to the three similar end lines, two of which have strikethroughs, you realize, it’s not the path we follow as readers; rather, it is the path she followed as the artist. I interpret the strikethroughs as a kind of transparent writing/editing process; a way of demonstrating that a subject is being “figured out.” Retrospectively, I’ll apply that logic to the links—the artist wants us to see her thought process. I’ll call it, “the journey of this artwork,” even though that’s cheesy, because it feels like that. So, all in all, it is simultaneously the narrative that the artist followed; the narrative that the artist wants us to follow; a constructed narrative artwork; a press release; and, I must say, a verbose and confusing document that may or may not be meant to be comprehended. I’d say, it’s both a metaphor for and physical manifestation of the vastness and quickness of internet information, but also its superficiality. It’s a few plunges into an unfathomably deep pool of information, which can be used for good or for evil, and certainly will be.

Such a complicated object, and we’re not even inside the show yet! This is literally thrilling. As you approach the gallery, which is actually an old elevator that Don made into a gallery, before you see inside it, you hear music. The volume of the music is weird. It’s not so loud that you can’t have a conversation, but it is so loud that you’re definitely hearing it; like, you can’t really tune it out. So even though the gallery itself is very little, the show really begins several steps away from the artwork, several steps before your realize where the music is coming from. This is another gesture toward narrating an experience, and another additional stimuli, a la the wordy and nerdy title of this show. Oh, and it’s classical music.

Inside the gallery is a rug, on the floor, where rugs belong, and a flat-screen TV, on the ceiling, definitely not where TVs belong. On each side of the TV there is a round white speaker—the source of the maddening music. So we’ve got a rug on the floor, printed (or painted) with an image, which looks like some kind of bare-bones rendering of a building drawn in perspective. An even simpler way of describing it would be a series of connected open cubes, rendered in perspective. The rug is white, maybe a warm white or an ivory, and the image on it is black. Also visually important is that the rug is on some kind of rubber backing, which sticks out beyond the rug, and creates a frame. So it could be construed as a rubber-framed rug print. As someone who has dabbled in rugs myself, I think it’s important to point out that many rugs have images on them, usually patterns. The quality of a rug may be determined by the image—if it is woven in, or printed on top; if it is made by hand, or by machine. Rugs don’t come with rubber-backings, like this one has, unless they are welcome mats, and even welcome mats don’t usually come with perimeters. I’m trying to get at the fact that this rug thing is very synthetic. It’s not a rug, it’s a rug-faker; but more on that later.

The flat-screen TV, mounted to the ceiling, is playing a video; if it’s on a loop, I don’t know how much of it I watched, which also means I don’t know how long the video is. I guess more than a video, it’s an animation; it’s the image on the rug, but rotating around in a three-dimensional space; again, a black drawing on a white background. This kind of image rotating in space as it does in this video recalls both architectural renderings and silly/engrossing crime shows, whose sets and plotlines revolve around some not-real technology that makes holograms that solve crimes, or something like that. All this contributes again to the synthetic feel of the show. Nothing is just “as-is”; everything is constructed, or should I say, everything is a construct.

One element I didn’t consider until this moment are the two fluorescent tubes that light the show, which are also hung from the ceiling in such a way next to the speakers as to look like sculptural elements. In this sense they are related to the rug, so I guess they are light-fakes; and I overheard Don say that the ceiling is false, too, so that’s a ceiling-fake; and the elevator, which it stationary; well, that’s fake too.

So at this point, we get that the “three dimensional stimuli” of the title of this artwork is floating in an animation above us, and its “reflected version” is under our feet (if we are standing in the gallery, looking up). We also get that the “mental rotation” of the press release is the rotation of the object, and the “space” is the gallery/elevator, and the “sound” is the music. I love how the next line in the press release is posed as a question, and at the perfect moment, and in no objective way: “But what is the object that is being promoted?” It’s the question of the hour, or of the show, and if you read the press release in its entirety you will understand, and if don’t, you will never know, unless someone who read the press release tells you (or the artist tells you). The use of the word “promoted” is really key here—it speaks to its non-neutrality, that somehow within the artwork Pam is assigning a subjective value to something that seems too object-like to resist objectivity. If there is a crux of the artwork, then it is the use of that word, promoted—not displayed, or screened, or shown, or on-view, or “that we see,” or my least favorite, explored—promoted. Which is what art does, and what design does too, and that this piece argues architecture is responsible for, and even decorating, and even entertainment. And this is why I want to shake Pam and say THANK YOU! Because this is a totally anti-modern artwork in so many ways, but the most important is that it demonstrates, in a weird sciency-theory-y way, that design is not neutral, and of course, neither are we.

Okay, so it’s the Trump/Pence logo, wherein the T penetrates the P (I thought even Trump knew it is typical in conservative-land for the P to penetrate the V). Stupid jokes aside, we get to the humor of this artwork. Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s humor, and not irony. Actually, its place in this artwork fits at least one definition of irony: incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (Merriam-Webster Online). So, that the T penetrates the P in the Trump/Pence logo is funny, and that this whole highly theoretical-seeming, highly-stylized, supremely slick artwork revolved around the T/P logo is also funny; but it also represents irony, and so does Trump’s presidency. I love this aspect of the artwork. It’s like, maybe that’s the lightbulb. When you’re standing in the gallery, looking up, and everything you’ve read and heard starts to make sense, and then you get that recognition of what you’re looking at, you sort of think, oh, I get it…the irony of it all! And if we can pull ourselves together long enough to think about Trump (which we can), we have the very same thought. The irony!

Of course, the thing I am not describing in great detail are the excerpts from the press release, which you may want to read now, if you haven’t done so yet. Each one is very different, and as we have traced, relates to a specific part of the artwork. Honestly, this stuff is very heady, and I only engaged in reading each one enough to get the jist of it; these aren’t really ideas I am personally interested in, or find very compelling. I don’t “nerd out” on stuff like this, so to speak. So the vague but lasting impression of each “concept” (as I’ll call them) for me goes something like this: 1) mental rotation has something to do with how the brain recognizes objects, and something to do with intelligence, and those objects are called stimuli; 2) that architecture, specifically ceiling height, affects the way people are able to solve problems (in an almost literal way); 3) the “Mozart effect” is when spatial cognitive tasks are improved after exposure to Mozart music; 4) that everyone made fun of the Trump/Pence logo; 5) the Norman Klein excerpt about “truthiness” was not something I could really comprehend; and 6) Hito Steyerl is saying something about proxy perspectives, and how we see things from above, even when we’re not seeing things from above. Of course, you and I are free to delve further into these ideas, or not; personally I like where this artwork takes me with only my superficial attempt at internalizing its concepts.

But perhaps that feeling, too, is a subject of this artwork; maybe not just our unwillingness to go in-depth, but our inability, too. Could I make a cohesive thought from all of these snippets of theory and psychology and internet gossip? No; but when I step into Pam’s elevator, I mean gallery, I experience all these ideas just a little bit, and as I stare upwards at the revolving penetrated P, I have a fleeting moment where I feel I have glimpsed the structures that undid the world that I knew to be real. Or maybe, Pam is arguing, they were always truthy, always unstable.

I think I’m getting to the end here, and I don’t know if I’ve really pinned down what this artwork is at all. It’s slippery, and it’s addictive, it’s too theoretical but it’s also brainless, it’s futuristic but also retro; it’s a rug and a TV and Mozart, and three pages of color print-outs. It’s far out.

I also want to say, props to Pam for making a political artwork that doesn’t evoke, either literally or metaphorically in any way, the American flag or its colors, and that doesn’t use rage to channel energy toward a rhetorical sentiment. I think this makes this artwork authentic, because in some ways, it speaks to her position. What we are experiencing here is political artwork that forgets about identity and reconfigures it as ideology. Pam is the artist, but the subject position is that of an object; we look up and down, we stand, we listen; inside, it is us that becomes the three dimensional stimuli, and perhaps everyone else is the dark mirror, the “reflected version,” if you will.

What else is there to say? It’s very important that you see this artwork in person if you can; images of it are almost pathetic, compared to the real thing. I’m really proud of this artwork, even though I didn’t make it, and that’s a totally new feeling for me; it makes me feel like, maybe art can communicate something beyond language, at least for a moment.

I didn’t have a title for this writing until I got to nearly the end of it. Usually some kind of title pops out at me, or I have it in mind before I start. For this show, I asked myself, if you had to take away just one idea from the entire artwork, what would it be? To me, it was what if we could see that our identities were ideologies? Well, what if we could? What if we could see that our rugs, and TVs, and music, and color printers, and color print-outs, and our houses, and our studios, and our friends, and the way we look up at things, or down at things, that all of those were ideologies thriving just beneath the surface of banality? I don’t know, but I’m willing to think about it. Even though in this dimension, for now, the T is still penetrating the P, in another dimension, there is no P or T at all. We’ll have to picture it; rotate it; chuck some of it away.

“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” is on view at ELEVATOR MONDAYS from Monday, November 6th, 2017 – Monday, January 1, 2018. For information on Pamela Valfer, please visit her website: http://pamelavalfer.com.

Georgia is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. For more information on her projects, please visit www.georgialikethestate.net