Liquid In The Light-Form’s Carburetor

Drawing from an archive of 35mm photographs he shot between 2003 and 2006, Lambert’s latest works bring a long-forgotten part of his practice into the present. About Press Release – Liquid In The Light-Form’s Carburetor November 7th - January 16th, 2027 la BEAST gallery is proud to present Liquid In The Light-Form’s Carburetor , its third exhibition with artist and poet Chyrum Lambert. Drawing from an archive of 35mm photographs he shot between 2003 and 2006, Lambert’s latest works bring a long-forgotten part of his practice into the present. Their rediscovery offered a curious possibility: that his fascination with color, form, and luminosity had already taken shape through photography, years before he began exploring these same qualities through painted collage. The opening reception of Liquid In The Light-Form’s Carburetor will take place Saturday November 7th, 6-9pm at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. About the Exhibition How many of us have a box of old photographs tucked away somewhere, perhaps in someone else’s garage, all but forgotten? Last year, just such a collection found its way back into Lambert’s hands. Poring over thousands of long-lost photographs, he recognized something familiar: their color and ambience bore an unexpected resemblance to the work he had spent decades developing. What interested him was not necessarily what the photographs depicted, but their peripheral details, the fall of light, a particular color, the space around a subject. For Lambert, painting and collage have always been closely intertwined, though the two processes remain distinct. His practice begins with the creation of painted marks, often produced in great quantities and without a predetermined composition in mind. These fragments are cut from their original surfaces, sorted, reconsidered, and eventually assembled into elaborate arrangements. A brushstroke might become a creeping vine, a strange organism, or something that resists identification altogether. A single composition might contain painted marks made years apart. With this vast photographic archive now at his disposal, the question was almost inevitable. If a painted mark could be removed from its original context and given an entirely different life, why couldn't an old photograph? Freed from their original subjects, these photographic fragments became another part of Lambert’s growing visual vocabulary. Passages of dappled light mingle with painted tear-drops, confusing the distinction between photography and painting. Light takes on the appearance of pigment, while painted surfaces assume an almost photographic presence. Neither medium is obliged to reveal its origins. What was once a record of a particular place or moment becomes something less certain, an image suspended between observation and invention. Lambert's compositions have always occupied an uncertain territory between the recognizable and the unknown. In these new works, that ambiguity extends to scale itself. Forms suggest bodies of liquid, atmospheric disturbances, or strange phenomena whose dimensions remain impossible to determine. Something might appear microscopic one moment and monumental the next. As Lambert puts it, “The goal is not to prove a specificity but to persuade possibilities.” There is something wonderfully circular about the entire endeavor. Photographs made more than twenty years ago now coexist with paintings produced at various points throughout Lambert’s life. Materials that once belonged to entirely separate moments are brought together in compositions that seem to exist outside any particular time or place. Ultimately, Lambert seems less concerned with where an image comes from than with what it might yet become. Read more Toggle Mixed media Painting