06 April - 07 May 2005: Shoulder Pad
For his third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Jim Lambie continues to reinvest the ephemera of popular culture with new life. Habitually employing records, record players, speakers, clothing, haberdashery, accessories, mirrors or doors, Lambie energetically reconfigures these items to become the compositional elements of new sculptural forms. The plasticity of the materials themselves is rediscovered, while the recognizability of the original objects offers an inroad into a metaphorical interpretation of their new incarnation. From here Lambie’s titles add another texture of further associations.
Jim Lambie was born in Glasgow in 1964 and continues to live and work there. He has had solo exhibitions throughout USA and Europe, including Male Stripper at Modern Art Oxford and Kebabylon at Inverleith House, Edinburgh (both 2003). He has participated in numerous group shows, including Early One Morning, Whitechapel Art Gallery (2002), Days Like These - Tate Triennial, Tate Britain (2003), represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and 54th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art. The first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Voidoid, has recently been published.
25 April - 01 June 2002: Salon Unisex
Jim Lambie’s second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ continues his association with music, atmosphere and social environments, a reminder that Scottish artist Lambie worked in the music industry before studying at Glasgow School of Art.
Using found materials such as discarded speakers, rock t-shirts, leather jackets and gloves, the sculptures obliquely harness the ability of music to transform mood and open up the mind. Lambie’s works have a freshness of form – something that is only partly to do with the fact that they look fun to make – that make the viewer feel that things are looking up: this is the hippest party in town. His surprising combinations of familiar objects are unpretentiously transformed by a psychedelic palate and energised with his economic efficiency. From bed-sit trash into talismans that alter physical and cerebral space, the works act like a favourite song - the sculptures lead and the audience follows. The objects become fetishistic artefacts by appearing to have, even for a moment, a significant force not quite their own, like the discarded tools of a shaman or magician.
Lambie has recently been included in major international group shows such as Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Centre, 2001, Here and Now – Scottish Contemporary Art at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee and currently in Gale Gates et al at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Last year, Lambie was one of the winners of the Paul Hamlyn Art Awards.
4 December - 11 January 2000: Weird Glow
Jim Lambie’s work has strong references to music both in his appropriation of particular objects or in the rhythm of his use of colour and repetition of form. Vinyl records, DJ’s record decks, pop posters, second-hand leather jackets and multicoloured belts are some of the found materials in Lambie’s work with each form used as a sculptural starting point. The original object is eventually covered up: floors with vinyl tape; record decks with glitter; record sleeves and posters with wool, paint or tape. These familiar forms are there to make the access easy: their simple shapes are transformed to psychological spaces by Lambie’s elaborate interventions. For his show at Transmission Gallery in his home town of Glasgow Jim Lambie covered the entire floor with ZOBOP (1999), an installation of psychedelic, multicoloured stripes in glossy vinyl tape. His Psychedelicsouldsticks, made up of multicoloured thread, bamboo cane and small objects like small Buddhas, broken pieces of vinyl or crushed cigarette packets, belong to the same psychedelic aesthetic but at the same time become shamanistic staffs of supernatural power. There is another hint of the latent magic in the circle of leather jacket backs offering up an ambiguous void or in the glitter covered record players turning at a slower than 45 speed to create a hypnotic field. Cryptic as they may be these objects are open to translation, Jim Lambie doesn’t like telling his stories with his work, he’d rather we make up our own. Rhythm is what binds them all together and for Jim Lambie they are just ‘things that bring people together’.
“Urp!! Let’s go!”
The Phantom (Marty Lott), is said to have been signed to Dot Records, after assaulting the label’s biggest star, Pat Boone, in church with a demo of ‘Love Me’. (Does this mean we have something to thank Pat Boone for?). Whilst The Phantom never quite became the next Elvis; he did manage to make an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, which must have been unforgettable for anyone who saw it. In 1966 however, The Phantom’s career was cut short when his out-of-control car ploughed over a cliff, (“Boy, was I pissed!”), and left him paralysed (good name for a song) from the waist down. “Love Me” is the most potent argument against concept albums there is. From its opening scream to its dying plea, it takes you places no double album rock opera could dare go- all in one and a half minutes!