Electric & Infinite Body: An Alphabet Of Looking
la BEAST gallery is proud to present ’Electric & Infinite Body: An Alphabet Of Looking’. In this showcase, artist and poet Chyrum Lambert eagerly explores the notion that human perception is anchored in the practice of categorizing the world, rendering understanding into smaller and smaller chucks. In his singularly unique way, Lambert emphasizes this idea by building an elaborate dictionary, visual in nature, that pushes the boundaries of language as we know it.
Is it Flora? Is it Fauna? Is it outer space? Is it Lava? So many things come to mind when exploring the depths of Lambert’s nebulous landscapes. Lambert says, “These forms resemble arthropods or stones or creeping vines to fog and smoke to decay and growth, of all or anything that lives and dies”. Without much context, it is easy to fall into ponderous paralysis, staring deep into an abyss of unstable textures. Despite the complexity, what becomes quickly apparent is that many of Lambert’s dramatic arrangements are peppered with square-like grids, creating moments of separation from the overall composition. The effect is clear. What was once wild has the ability to be captured and contained.
But why create chaos just to restrain it? Encountering commotion, filtering its essence, and creating a system out of its parts, is of course, undeniably human. We strive to make sense of the world, the expanse, the vibrations of nature. But it’s all so big; so incomprehensible. So what do we do? Well…we break it down, chunk it out, and hope beyond hope, that meaning can be derived. Lambert writes, “It's like a completely impossible idea: wanting to take what we see and narrow it down to basic, simple constituents. And then, well, what do you do with that?”
Lambert’s message is unmistakable. The alphabet as we know it, is a very strange idea indeed. Whether it be the ABC’s, the one-two-threes, or the orders of magnitude of the periodic table, as a world of people, we invent ways to render our surroundings into nuggets of digestible understanding. Somehow, through trial and error, systems have been built, speech has flowed, and symbols have become entrenched. This process never stops. Lambert, it seems, is making his own distinct contribution, adding to the ever-changing lexicon. Lambert states, “It can work in different ways. If you can pull from things to make an alphabet, then you can use that alphabet to construct the sentence in a new way. There’s no real, practical way of doing it. But I think language is a totally absurd thing already!”
It’s impossible to gaze on Lambert’s work and feel underwhelmed. His paintings are dense, teeming with organic life, fluttering in place. Yet, Lambert has introduced more than just the theory of growth. Through the use of a mysterious data set, he acknowledges his position as inventor; the author of specialized knowledge. As perplexing as it all is, an irrefutable feeling of satisfaction washes over those who look. To witness an act, in the midst of creation, is a gift in and of itself.
“It looks like it could be a claw. But it also looks like a knife on a soft pillow. It could be a number of things. And the thing is, it has to stay kind of strange and vague because that's the way letters work too…in an alphabet. If I just look at a Q, I'm like, ‘I don't really know what I'm looking at here.’ But when I look at it in a sentence, it makes a lot of sense.”—Chyrum Lambert
Born and raised near Mount Rainier in Washington state, Chyrum Lambert deeply misses the forest of his youth. Without conscious effort, his work reflects a reverence for nature. Through a lush color palette and breathing vernacular, he summons intimations of stone, leafy overgrowth, fire, and ambient fog. Oddly, Lambert’s work does not contain any representational imagery. Instead, the artist recontextualizes these primordial elements through ecosystem-like structures that illustrate the connections between forms and states of existence. In the words of the artist: “Sometimes what is hidden is more reliant on the one looking rather than the object being looked at. A belief of mine is that looking can be a type of changing—if one points their attention in the right direction.” Prioritizing exploration as a key tenet of his practice, Lambert’s biological altars provoke a fundamental desire to discover that which is beyond the horizon.
His process begins with a meditative approach to painting, a raw mark-making of sorts, focusing on texture and color, using a slew of different media, often stumbling upon happy accidents. Lambert completely separates constructing his collaged compositions from the physical act of painting textures, instead clearing his mind and reveling in the satisfaction of pushing pigment across a welcoming surface of paper. Lambert is drawn to high-contrast jumps in color and is particularly concerned with opalescence and tonal value, taking great pleasure in influencing his materials in order to extract their unique characteristics. Drawing from a massive collection created over a period of years, the artist reuses and retires his painted surfaces as he sees fit.
Lambert arrived at his unique methodology as a means to mitigate the innate fear that accompanies all creative acts. By compartmentalizing the act of painting from constructing, he maximizes spontaneity without sacrificing control. When he’s ready to focus on a singular work, Lambert carefully extracts desired shapes, sometimes cutting out dozens of delicate arrangements for one piece. While undefined, the forms that populate these pieces exist at the edge of recognition, somehow a cross between knowing what it is and not knowing at all. Attracted to ambiguous forms that oscillate between abstract and familiar, the artist seeks to create images that challenge or defy the rules of known logic.
Winnowing figures from an ether of watercolor washes and acrylic brushstrokes, Lambert animates these forms across mounted paper on a self-made wooden board. The artist seeks resolution through contemplation and play, using painters-tape to rearrange and pose the collage elements before gluing them in place upon his cream, and now black colored stage. This ever-evolving process is beholden to the artist’s unconscious. Repetitive, glyph-like symbols, added in colored pencil, serve as navigational tools for the artist as much as the viewer. The artist describes the action as purely reactive, forcing him to slow down and relinquish control of his creation. As if whispering a spell, Lambert’s works often display illegible characters, rune-like textual fields, somewhat like mystic debris or evidence of the ritual of creation. Lambert writes,
“...for something like an image of fire, to appear hot like a flame, but also add to what that flame emotes…and if successful, create a space where the basic assumptions about the orthodoxy of these objects can be questioned according to the needs of those who look.”