25 March – 25 April 2009: Television
TELEVISION, Jim Lambie’s fourth show at Sadie Coles HQ, comprises a series of experiments in the transformation and perception of space and energy. The viewers’ sightlines are first disrupted as Lambie applies the latest incarnation of The Strokes to the floor. One of Lambie’s vibrant vinyl tape pieces, The Strokes’ fluorescent curves and swirls navigate the gallery’s architecture, undulating over and around every cranny and groove. Quietly, a number of Sonic Reducers, concrete blocks containing record spines, sink into the floor. From the walls, collaged eyes peer out from between mosaiced fragments of mirror that hypnotically expand and refract the surroundings. The eyes, extracted from their original contexts and left to swim in patches of bright colours, stare in every direction. In another piece the unexpected prevails again as a chair reveals itself to be made out of metal belts. Lambie’s disparate sculptural objects combine in exhibition to form a kind of super-installation whose elements are bound together by the floor’s pervasive patterns.
The process by which Lambie’s floor-works are made is highly physical and labour intensive. Tellingly, he refers to these works as sculptures, equating them with his more conventionally sculptural pieces and suggesting that they serve in an equivalent way to occupy and transform space. Lambie has discussed the relationship between the tape works and the solid objects they incorporate in terms of jazz ensemble, comparing the tape to the “baseline played by the drums and bass” and the pieces placed on top to the “guitar and vocals.” With Lambie, musical sources and inspirations are never hard to discern. His visual as well as verbal vocabulary often borrow from music, as when he describes the 1960s and ‘70s junk he uses in his work as having “a universal resonance”. Mixing up the histories of abstraction and Op Art, Lambie induces a beguiling sense of vertigo. Jonathan Jones has succinctly written of Lambie and his practice: ‘Here is an artist who apparently works in a frenzy of pure creativity, spewing out fun and beauty with energy, grace, and a strange, unfettered, totally unpretentious imagination. Without claiming any obvious social or political or indeed personal "meaning", and yet in ways and in materials that root his imagination naturally and easily in the everyday, Jim Lambie is a demiurge, a magician.’
Born in Glasgow in 1964, Lambie studied at the Glasgow School of Art and he continues to live and work in his hometown. He has exhibited worldwide with several solo exhibitions including ones in 2008 at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Glasgow; the Hara Museum, Tokyo; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and in 2007 at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He has also participated in numerous group shows, including Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, MOMA, New York, 2008, and Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, New Museum, New York, 2007. In 2004, he participated in the 54th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Voidoid, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist was published in 2004 and Lambie was nominated for The Turner Prize in 2005.
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!