Claire Lambe: Lazyboy

Claire Lambe: LazyBoy comprises the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition draws on and extends Lambe’s interest in pleasure, ritual, commodity culture as well as public and domestic modes of collecting, arranging and displaying objects. Comprising a series of new sculptural works that include both assembled as well as cast resin and pewter elements, LazyBoy highlights the complex meanings and associations that can be drawn between domestic and perverse objects. Lambe’s Candy Barr (2012), for example, is a seductive sculptural assemblage of raw steel and mirrors that recalls cocktail cabinets and display units, and is named for the 1970s American stripper credited as being the first ‘porn star’.

Lambe is interested in focusing our attention on individual artefacts and sculptural objects and their cultural and social meanings; thus revealing the dichotomy by which (through modes of organisation and display) one can be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by an object. She states: I’m fascinated and seduced by everything including ugly, kitschy things that people tend to reject. This dynamic cannot simply be reduced to the logic of commodity culture, but rather has to do with a subjective relationship to the ‘otherness’ of things — and the tension that occurs when you seek that ‘other.’