Glaswegien artist JIM LAMBIE has a wonderful talent for creating engaging, compelling, and playful works of art from humble, everyday materials as well as the usually overlooked sites and scenes at the periphery of human perception and consciousness. But that’s not the only reason that his first solo exhibition in Australia, the intriguingly titled “Zero Concerto,” which is currently on show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney until September 26, is arguably one of the most compelling and entrancing commercial gallery shows of recent times. Instead of just presenting a showcase of his recent works, Lambie has transformed the gallery into an immersive floor-to-ceiling environment that engages with notions of the inner and the outer, the public and the private, the seen and the unseen, and in the process challenges viewers to contemplate and the way they interact with, and perceive, the world around them.The title of the exhibition, which is taken from a piece of music by the Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra, hints at Lambie’s passion for music – a passion that inspires him to approach each work “like a musical composition where each element could represent an instrument.” Growing up with a father who ran Scotland’s first mobile disco on weekends undoubtedly had a significant impact on Lambie who is himself an accomplished DJ and musician with a short stint as a member of the Glaswegian band The Boy Hairdressers to his name. Lambie’s extensive use of bright colours and vibrant tones to create a sense of rhythm and energy could be interpreted as a direct extension of his musical interests. But although music is a bit part of Lambie’s practice, he says that he never starts a piece of work thinking about music and doesn’t try to explain music through sculpture or painting.The most colourful, rhythmic work, and musical workin the exhibition is the latest iteration of Lambie’s signature floor-based “Zobop” series, which in this instances focuses attention on the floorboards of the gallery space which Lambie has totally covered with strips of multicoloured mirror-finish vinyl tape. Each colour change represents beginning of one floorboard and the start of the next, which Lambie says “creates a different map of the room.” This simple yet poetic intervention, which Lambie has titled “Sound System,” highlights the simple pattern of the floorboards – a gesture that epitomizes his desire to “bring the out-of-focus into focus” and sets the scene and the tone for the rest of the exhibition while at the same time emphasis the significance of the way Lambie engages and interacts with the spaces in which he works. “The space makes work,” Lambie explains. “As long as I work within the existing system the work makes itself,” he says. Lambie’s acute awareness of his surroundings and his keen eye for the “unseen” comes to the fore in his “Metal Box” series of works, which take inspiration from the layers of band posters that can be found plastered on top of each other on walls in Glasgow. Using aluminium and polished steel sheets as a substitute for the posters, Lambie recreates the effects of the weather on the band posters whose corners curl when they get wet, revealing sections of the previous poster beneath. Having sandwiched together a number of the metal sheets, each of which has one side painted in a different colour, Lambie then bends the corners inwards by hand to expose slivers of colour that mimic the weathered, dogeared gig posters. “It’s hard to predict how the colour combinations will look,” Lambie says. “I like that the work makes itself.”The genius of the reinterpretation and reimagining of everyday, ordinary materials that is a signature of Lambie’s practice is particularly evident in the artist’s “potato sack” paintings, two of which appear in the exhibition. “Every day walking home I go by lots of fruit and veg shops with these paper potato sacks and I began to think about those because they were kind of catching my sideways glance and that is what I was picking up on,” Lambie says. With the “potato sack paintings,” the painted potato sacks serve as a vehicle for Lambie to explore what a painting is, how it is spoken about, and how it is set up. Presented as painterly wall-mounted three-dimensional interventions, they explore the notion of the painting as a portal or window into another space. “The window could be seen as a portal and if that portal was going out of the room then there may be a portal coming in,” Lambie says. “I wanted to create a painting that felt as though it was spilling into the room and placing you directly you here and anchoring you here the way that the floor anchors you here.”One of the reasons that Lambie’s practice is so successful and so effective is that it is highly accessible on a purely visual level but becomes increasingly more intellectual and complex the deeper you delve, as is evident in the highly conceptual work “Blue Monday” which was created by Lambie while he was in Sydney. Taking as his point of departure a junkshop-acquired book called “Blue Monday,” which is also the title of a 1983 single by British band New Order, Lambie has activated a space in the gallery that he calls a “non-space as far as a gallery goes” and “the kind of space you leave a mop or brush.” In this “non-space” Lambie has placed a plastic contained filled with water, vodka, and blue dye in which sits the book whose author is covered by a large rock that holds the book down – “you can’t speak underwater,” Lambie states – but also forces the viewer to concentrate solely on the title of the book. Lambie describes the work as something that is almost unspeakable and for which there is no proper way to describe. “It’s an internal dialogue; a deep, deep, deep private space that I’m sure everybody has,” he says. “The words are never enough to cover that space. It’s a space that words cannot and will never be able to talk about.”The title work of the exhibition, “Zero Concerto,” comprises a black dress shoe placed on the floor of the far gallery facing out of the room, over which hangs a clear plastic bag dripping black paint. The matching shoe can be found in another work at the other end of the gallery, creating what Lambie describes as “bookends” for the exhibition. “There is a sense of things moving in and out of the room through the show; of things not quite there, not quite anchored in the room,” Lambie explains. “You can imagine it like a kind long stride and an imagined distance between my two feet,” he says. “So all of this space is kind of happening like an imagined space; what that distance between my two feet could be.” Although the distance between the two shoes is vast, the span of the exhibition is relatively small in the scheme of museum-quality curated shows. The fact that Lambie is able to establish such an engaging, thought-provoking, and diverse-yet-well- resolved exhibition within such a limited commercial space is testament to his vision, foresight, imagination, and talent.JIM LAMBIE “Zero Concerto” is at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney until September 26, 2015.Click the slideshow to see images from the exhibition
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