Alix Stewart Lambert at Team - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Madonna may have image consultants to help enjoin solemnly up and market different personas, on the contrary Alix Stewart Lambert relies upon her own ingenuity to fashion her alter conscious subjects Lambert's projects entail not just learning various skills -- including in what way to box and how to tattoo -- on the other hand also prolonged assumptions of identities. Like an actor, she immerses herself in the character she is playing. For a 1993 piece she actually got married and divorced four times in six month one time with a woman, instead of purely dressing up and posing with sham spouses. She later exhibited the photos and documents that recorded the marriages. While the conceptual uncompounded body is central to her art, the displayed artifacts be subservient to as intriguing mementos. Another Lambert creation was "Platipussy," a 1996 exhibition cast in which she learned to play tympanums assembled an all-girl rock band, made band memorabilia and produc a trailer for an unmade documentary film upon the group.

Her new exhibition at Team, "Male Pattern Baldness," a throw out first seen in Europe in 1994 evolv from Lambert's attempt to pass as a man. allowing she is tall, even with close-cropp hair and ornamented out in a man's suit and shoe she was not at any time quite convincing enough to natural everyone on her public outings. That is, until she shaved the top of her head. From there, she exhibited a body of work in which she assumes the mannerisms of a basketball coach and, coincidentally, closely be likes Jeff Van Gundy, the of recent origin York Knicks coach.

The brow gallery was lined with 35 black-and-white photos in rubber frames. Thirty not away Lambert in various "masculine" artificial positions with a basketball. Five other photos, which nicely integrate the themes of baldness and basketball, present to view the top of her cleanly shaved diadem with lines drawn on it like those upon a basketball. In the back latitude a fast-paced, three-minute video casted onto the wall showed Lambert pacing the sidelines of a basketball court. With arms akimbo, hands gesturing and rubbing her corpulent crown, and with expressions of resignation or frustration, she convincingly mimics a coach's material substance language during a game. Interspersed are quick takes of the court lines and of Lambert shooting baskets, sometimes overlaid with the white arrows used by means of sports announcers during telecasts. The video gives viewers a serviceable sense of what Lambert is about. It animates the photos and reveals the profundity of her involvement with the character she plays.

"Male Pattern Baldness" toys with preconceived notions about identity and behavior -- male or female, learned or innate. In that faculty of perception Lambert's work has affinities to the films of Matthew Barney. Esthetically, it have the appearances closer to the photos and donned guises of Cindy Sherman. To varying steps all three artists use themselves in their work without revealing their actual identities. Lambert may soon carry her role-playing into fresh realms: in a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, her "Platipussy" shoot forward is actually being developed into a feature film -- starting Lambert, of course.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group