Quodlibetica

Dead Seductive: The Icky Allure of Pamela Valfer’s Fauna

Written By: Collier White Constellation 05 11.23.09

When Valfer meets me at the door to her studio, she is bursting with energy, pigtailed and grinning ear to ear. I reassess my approach to the work. I can see that she won’t countenance dramatics or simple morbidity. I’m left with the task of approaching the tangible play and subtlety of her work with sentences that may too definitively assert what the work only suggests.

The works themselves remain: corporeal, animal, and unmistakably obsessed with death. Approaching a quilt made of vintage mink pelts, I note the tiny plastic eyes on their faces and ask, “Did you add these?” My question is meant to tease out some boiler plate observations on the uncanny. Valfer won’t indulge me. She lights up, “No. They came like that. Isn’t it weird?! My grandmother used to have one of these.” She reaches intProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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a bucket on the floor, pulls out a mink that has not yet been repurposed: raw material, as it were. It looks dried and unimpressive, and I can’t imagine the aristocracy nor even the hoi polloi willfully draping themselves in these gaudy pelts – dead things with cheap plastic eyes whose shriveled heads recall the faces of squirrels. She demonstrates how they used to be linked together, forepaw to hind leg, into a scarf.

I try to bait Valfer into a conversation about the abject and its role in her work. She corrects me, matter-of-factly and somewhat self-effacingly, putting theory in perspective. “I don’t really work from theory. I start with the object. With creating a seduction, something that people want to approach even though they are unnerved by it. I don’t want to use the word ‘organically’.” Then, she remembers the question: “Are you asking do I read? Yes, I read.”

The pieces from her exhibition, now hanging bagged on the walls of her studio, ready for the next deployment, rearrange themselves in my mind. They are the crafted works of an artist who is working from the most basic, guttural unit of push-pull upward through levels of complexity.  Perhaps you think I was a little hard on Valfer to assume contrivance, but I’m wary of a current trend: a deployment of the abject as a kind of lure. The most hideous contemporary example of this is the Bodies exhibition, currently on display at the Mall of America. Curiosity about actual corpses is exploited heavily in the advertising, but the curatorship at Bodies eschews a focus on the origins of the bodies – rumored to be tortured Chinese prisoners – and instead gives us dry academic facts about the desiccated corpses.

The result is a bizarre sideshow that seems so at odds with its own creation that the echoes of the carnival barker can almost be heard below the industrial hum of its scientism.  The exhibition invites us to a macabre waxworks, then pulls a bait and switch, deliberately concealing the actual horrors of its own socio-political genesis. The result is a different sort of cabinet of horrors, where the walking dead of another culture are forced to bare their bodies, shed their skin, and perform feats of distinctly American athleticism that seem to mock the inhumanity of their own ends. With the skin removed, their faces are still distinctly Asian, not the European faces used in the illustrated advertisements.

Bodies is forgettable because its narrative of science and progress deliberately denies the fascination for the macabre that draws viewers to the exhibit in the first place. In contrast, Valfer’s work repurposes more common detritus of death – recycled animal skins and faces found in thrift shops – to reanimate the animus and assert both its aliveness and totemic quality of death. In her newest work (as yet unshown), Valfer attaches actual animal faces to cute flock figurines, a different sort of return of the repressed.

It’s this provocative aspect that made it surprising to find her work at the Phipps Center for the Arts last month. The Phipps is one of these semi-rural mega-galleries that asserts a cosmopolitan aesthetic even as it justifies its existence with the inclusion of a provincial community focus: a pastoral view of the St. Croix river, a children’s theater, community education programs, and Valfer’s detailed drawings of roadkill in the galleries upstairs.

Is Hudson, Wisconsin finally getting hip to modern art’s more corporeal meditations on death? I shudder to imagine the staler provocations of Damien Hirst shipped to winter their last days in flyover country as newer, more shocking provocateurs establish an ever more gruesome avant-garde (see Jan Estep’s piece on these artists).

But in the Phipps, Valfer’s work was intriguingly recontextualized by its presentation alongside the pastoral. Her dizzyingly grotesque quilts hang next door to another artist’s pleasantly conventional landscape paintings. She takes pains to point out that her furs are recycled. Not a brute, then, but it would be a mistake to read into Valfer’s femininity any echo of the scolding of some campus vegetarian.  Her work is animated by a love of animals, to be sure, but also by a complete embrace of both the beautiful and the ugly aspects of this world, leaving no room for sanctimoniousness. She is focused on craft and representation, not polemics.

Yet her work resonates a poignancy that is beyond mere craft. In her studio, I am drawn back to a small diorama lit by a single floodlight. On a square of rural highway carved from an HO scale world, a doe returns to check on her fawn, who is crumpled at the center line. The floodlight casts their stark shadows onto a line drawing of more deer on the wall. “That’s just play, I would probably never show that,” Valfer says. I can see why: it is too manipulative, too plainly sad, and its simple arrangement does not satisfy her requirement of challenging and unusual craftsmanship. Yet its childlike exploration of death provides an empathy that may be too muted in the other works. Although Valfer works adeptly at all of her media, it is across the works and not in individual pieces where I find a surprising synthesis, leading from the commonplace deaths of animals into a context that invites reflection and empathy.

3.) Valfer. Blue-winged Teal. (2008) charcoal and colored pencil 19″ x 16″.

4.) Valfer. HWY 35 & County Road V, Sommerset, WI. (2007) charcoal on paper. 30 1/2″ x 30 1/2″.

5.) Valfer. What Is and What Will Be. (2008) charcoal and colored pencil. 30″ x 44″.

6.) Valfer. Untitled. (2009) mixed media.

7.) Valfer. Untitled. (2009) mixed media.