After seeing several Jim Lambie exhibitions conceived as installations—“Paradise Garage” in Venice in 2003, “Mental Oyster” in New York last year—it’s a pleasure to once again be reminded of his proficiency as a sculptor, a maker of oddly enchanting objects. The five discrete works in this small show give us Lambie the nonchalant appropriator and glam formalist. Whether or not the sculptures incorporate direct musical references—Sweet Exorcist (all works 2005), an oversized psychedelic God’s eye, includes a 12” record at its center—one can’t help but see sonically. He even works like a DJ: The small wooden cubes covered in aluminum tape affixed to the black-tape-covered jeans in Blacktronic are a remix of the mirror shards decorating handbags and pleather pants at Anton Kern last year. Split Endz (wig mix) is a Swiss-cheese minimalist cube painted pink; the glittering belts that festoon the holes excised from its upper reaches could have been taken from the Friday night visitors to the local discotheque. The mirrors and glitter and the colorful paint (applied liberally) make the case for Lambie as a Kandinsky (or synesthete Nabokov) for the DJ-and-mash-up generation.
