Jim Lambie is a Scottish artist with a penchant for found objects and sculptural relief. His new exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts is a striking example of his signature style.
The "RSVP: Jim Lambie" exhibit is installed in the West Wing Galleria, placed on the wall opposite the café and museum store. This space is rarely, if ever, used as gallery space. Lambie transformed the neglected wall into an optical illusion of black tape and sculptural forms made from brightly painted chair parts and mirror-covered handbags.
Lambie's work is part of the "RSVPmfa" series, which invites artists to produce creations inspired by the architecture of the museum itself. The specific nature of the series fosters a conception of art that is unique to the museum and to the individual relationship each artist has within the space.
Lambie's series is no different, immediately intriguing the viewer with eye-catching color and contrast. The black tape makes a curvilinear pattern that weaves its way along the wall creating a dizzying effect. Disassembled chair pieces are put together in groups and hung on the wall at different heights. The repetitive chair parts are painted in bright colors such as red, blue, purple, neon green, orange and yellow. The hanging purses covered in glinting mirror shards provide a kaleidoscopic effect to the arrangement of legs and seat backs.
This exhibit can be viewed a number of ways - all from different angles, providing the viewer with myriad options. No two views are alike; Lambie plays with the negative space of the wall pattern and the chairs to create a visually rich and intriguing setup.
The wall text confirms there are no political agendas or greater meanings in this work. Lambie simply manipulates these regular, everyday objects to create an art form. He is not interested in elevating the status of these objects to high art, as Duchamp did with his "Fountain," nor is he interested in asserting that the splintered chairs are not actually chairs, as Magritte did with his pipe. Lambie presents the chairs just as they are in order to contest the notion of highly technical conceptual art. What you see is what you get, albeit ever-changing and dynamic as viewers move from one end of the wall to the other.
Lambie's exhibit almost seems like an amusement park madhouse gone wrong, with the black and white criss-cross pattern forming an optical illusion and the distorting mirrors broken and glued to women's handbags. The piece provides an interesting contrast, not only due to the objects themselves, found and then manipulated in a new and innovative way, but also due to the fact that the chair-covered wall is located across from the museum café, where chairs are arranged and used in a normal fashion, with people sitting in them and purses draped off the arms.
Diners take notice of the way in which this seemingly mundane and customary furniture is deconstructed and reformed to create something unusual. The chairs that are normally upright and supportive are now broken apart and protruding from the walls almost as if the tape pattern on the vertical wall is the new floor and the chairs are reoriented to be upright on its surface.
The museum's West Wing Galleria is often ignored and underappreciated space. Lambie certainly makes use of this fact, and his "RSVPmfa" series is a perfect example of Lambie's artistic expression: taking the regular and making it something special. There is no greater meaning to ferret out; the arrays of colorful chair pieces are visually stimulating, and that is entirely - and solely - the point.
RSVP: Jim LambieAt the West Wing Galleria, through May 25, 2008Museum of Fine Arts, Boston465 Huntington Avenue617-267-9300
