Lambert's new paintings and sculptures explore her personal experiences by extracting them, from a visual language of impressions, recollections and desires. The artist engages her audience with a seemingly primordial dilemma - that only by decidedly accepting mortality and death.
Painting and Sculpture
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present Little Deaths, marking Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Lambert’s new paintings and mixed media sculptures intuitively explore her personal experiences by extracting them, both consciously and subconsciously, from a visual language of impressions, recollections and desires.
Lambert draws on imagery and observations that resonated with her during a recent visit to Rome—focusing on primal objects and emblematic figurines placed in her own imaginary "collections" that become Lambert’s individual versions of the alabaster busts she encountered in The Hall of Busts at the Vatican. Little Deaths alludes to the artifacts as symbols of our collective unconscious, while also implying, as the original French phrase "la petite mort" suggests, a metaphor for sexual climax. A nude body reclined and draped over a heap of skulls synonymously connotes both post-orgasmic pleasure and the stillness of death. Analogously, a totemic sculpture made out of mundane and recycled materials and a life-like bust evoke and intimate the characteristics of a shrine or altar commemorating Lambert’s personal history.
With her bold brushstrokes and raw sculptures, Lambert engages her audience with a seemingly primordial dilemma—that only by decidedly accepting mortality and death, can we enter into a new phase of growth and creation, consequently raising one of the most principal questions of humanity—whether we, as humans, rather live to die or die to live every day of our existence.
Lambert was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and currently lives in Queens, NY and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from Hunter College, New York, NY and a BA in Visual Arts from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and in The Netherlands, Germany and most recently South Korea. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Yaddo Foundation Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY; Vermont Studio Center Scholarship, Johnson, VT; the Anderson Ranch Art Center Residency, Snowmass Village, CO; and the Plattes Clove Artist Residency, Arkville, NY.
Image: Bed (Little Deaths), 2009. Acrylic and collage on canvas 100 x 84 in. (254 cm x 213 cm). Diptych, Each panel 50 x 84 in.
Also on view:
Touhami Ennadre
Under New York. Photographs
Opening Reception Thursday, November 5, 6 – 9 PM
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Fl. New York, NY 10001
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11AM – 6 PM or by appointment.