The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
In Jim Lambie’s La Scala fabricated and everyday objects were playfully and suggestively interspersed within the large and smaller gallery spaces of Gerhardsen Gerner. These materials and objects were recognisably from both the domestic and music-venue worlds, and they produced an installation with a strange nostalgic intensity and humour. The Ballad of the Buffalo Gals (all works 2016) comprises a truncated set of stairs made from Judd-like pressed and powdercoated aluminium, box-shaped steps that protrude from the gallery wall. The steps are a lurid dark blue, and on one sits a ghetto blaster that has been pimped out with a set of horns (like those of a Viking helmet) either side, a series of aerials, and two Quadrophenia-like moped rearview mirrors. Different colours of paint have been daubed across the double tape deck and radio dial. Hanging under the ‘stairs’ is a found embroidered seat cushion doubling as an over-sized pin cushion from which are fixed, with a series of gold-coloured safety pins, a number of lengths of vibrant fabric—belts, ties, jacket zips, or cravats.
On the opposite wall was Teardrop Boombox (La Scala), another set of steps, this time in bright yellow, upon which are three jet-black casts of the smaller more reserved radio/single-tape-type music player. Under this set of steps are a series of dessert spoons bent into right angles, their handles screwed to the wall, and carefully mounded in the bowl of each spoon are small mountains of various colours of paint pigment, all of which suggests an almost synaesthesic re-arrangement of musical notes, memories, movements, materials.
Arranged in the middle of the space is Cosmic Vortex (Deeper and Deeper), a three-seater couch painted