John Hurrell – 8 October, 2024

In a startlingly touring exhibition Michael Mahne Lamb presents a collection of hung or freestanding, curved and flat forms that innovatively marry architectural photography with sculpture. While photography can be seen as a form of sculpture anyway (after all it has three dimensions) with Lamb the crossover is overt. ie. in your face. Large unmounted, unframed photographs are the raw material. Their flexibility is a salient feature, particularly when shown as protruding horizontal wavelike ripple forms demonstrating the impact of gravity. Or as vertical rolls. As if made of vinyl.

Positioned within the large Gallery One, or street-facing outer-wall window box, these enigmatic forms are sculpturally co-ordinated with sheets of clear perspex that often are invisible (depending on where you are standing), or leaning rectangular aluminium panels that have muted blurry reflections. The wave-shaped or flat glossy surfaces of the photographs and the mentioned shiny clear perspex ‘boxes’ or sheets holding them up (that they usually interact with) immediately capture in a much more precise fashion reflected light passing through the large window or inside glass door. And the light from the fluorescent tubes high above.

Unlike the outside light source, these glowing, linear, ceiling-based illuminations—when reflected—become because of the shapes of the shiny surfaces below, what might be seen as disruptive. Or alternatively they might be regarded as an intentional strategy to force you to look more closely.

This ambiguous question arises because of the treatment of the photographs on the floor or walls, which often become arcs due to the bevelled slits in the thick transparent perspex, made with precision using a router. The photographed images are threaded through these thin cuts, creating the distinctive looped wavelike forms-or else left lying flat underneath.

The show’s title thus refers to those slits in the perspex, and the intrusion of light into the space through windows placed between brutalist concrete walls, and maybe, some might argue, the apertures for admitting light for exposure on film in analogue cameras.
Lamb’s choice of manipulated photos feature huge skyscrapers, packed with glass grids, extending up into the sky—or outside or (mirrored) inside wall surfaces, or sloping corrugated-iron rooves—so there is a certain droll humour in presenting them horizontally or as buckled, doubled-over or undulating forms. The large prints are deliberately rich in texture, with the pale tones strangely grainy and speckly, and long streaks prevalent in the dark values. Any sense of illusionist intentions within the images is soon banished.

The transparent vertical boxes the photos interact with can be imaginatively interpreted as analogue ‘cameras’ containing scrolls to hold unexposed film. Also—in a peculiar fashion—the gallery itself becomes a second ‘outer’ camera that contains the other much smaller ‘inner’ ones, its space seemingly corrupted by the many reflected white crossing lines so readily apparent. A microcosm inside a macro.

Lamb’s use of optically dematerialising evanescence can be linked (historically) to Robert Irwin, and the use of unstable shimmering reflection to say Leon Narbey—if you wanted to ponder vague antecedents from much much earlier famous installation projects.

Let’s look at the salient properties of the nine sculptures here, individually.

Floor Suspension I (22015-21), 2024, and Floor Suspension II (23002-36), 2024 are horizontal works (with perspex) that are flush with the floor. Wall Suspension I (22015-2), 2024, and Wall Suspension II (23001-3), 2024, are vertical (with perspex) pieces that are fixed to a wall. Plate I (23003-8), 2024, and Plate II (23001-27), 2024, are vertical (without perspex) that are leaning against the wall, mixing photograph with aluminium plate. Structure I (23002-11), 2024 is a freestanding vertical sculpture on the floor, again mixing photograph with perspex, and finally, on the floor of the gallery’s street window bay, draping photographs over perspex, we have Prototype II, 2024 and Prototype III, 2024.

Different sorts of b/w photograph are used in these nine hybrids where identifying the depicted subject matter is sometimes not easy.

Floor Suspension I (22015-21), 2024: shows a sloping corrugated iron roof.

Floor Suspension II (23002-36), 2024: an open black box.

Wall Suspension I (22015-2), 2024: a transparent trampoline leaning against a wall.

Wall Suspension II (23001-3), 2024: a wall, floor and vertical mirror.

Plate I (23003-8), 2024: a multi-panelled wall with shutter, hanging wires and screws.

Plate II (23001-27), 2024: a pristine grid of dots on black field reversed from a negative.

Structure I (23002-11), 2024: parallel wooden slats on a venetian blind.

Prototype II, 2024: a view of six horizontal lines of vertical windows indicating different stories of a modernist building, flipped on its side.

Prototype III, 2024: a downward facing shot of a paint-encrusted studio floor.

Lamb’s is a dense (optically) complicated show, but if you like scrutinising unusual images or sculptures that are a bit like phenomenological puzzles, then it is great fun. They are tough and appealing together. Worth the applied concentration.

John Hurrell

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