Elevator Maze, a matrix of elevator banks that becomes a tunnel of reflection, underscores Leandro Erlich’s sense of the uncanny. Through this transgression of limits and perception, the artist challenges certain absolutes and the institutions that reinforce them. Stripped of their function and context, Elevator Maze highlights the narrative potential of the ordinary and its psychological implications. As viewers inhabit and observe the installation, they create their own stories, finding answers to Erlich’s visual questions. Elevators are, in Erlich’s words, “a functional object, but one in which life seems to be suspended parenthetically. Recorded voices and music may intervene to ease the discomfort of the ride, but we cannot avoid ourselves in such a space and so experience the Sartrean room of the self. We are no one, nowhere, anyone, anyplace”.
Leandro Erlich, Elevator Maze
La obra de Leandro Erlich siempre juega con la tensión entre lo que percibimos y lo que estamos acostumbrados a percibir. En Ascensores, el espectador presencia un pasillo de ascensores que aparentan ser uno solo, con el efecto del infinito al que estamos acostumbrados; pero cada ascensor es parte de una hilera de ventanas, espacios reales que se conjugan con las imágenes espejadas. Cuando entra otro espectador, el reflejo propio que esperamos se convierte en el reflejo del otro. Como suele ocurrir en el trabajo de Erlich, una experiencia cotidiana se vuelve un laboratorio del ser.
Leandro Erlich, Elevator Maze
Leandro Erlich often plays with the tension between what we see and what we are used to seeing. In Elevator Maze, the viewer is presented with a hallway of elevators that appear to be a single car. In conversation with the infinite reflection we have often experienced in these spaces, each elevator shares a communicating window between each car. When another visitor enters the passageway, the reflection we expect to be our own becomes the reflection of another. As often happens in Erlich’s work, an everyday experience becomes an unsettling exploration of the self.
