In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.
Bird Life, her largest painting, frames flocks of a various of birds in dynamic spectacle. Gesture gives way to a collage-like effect as it meets up with jigsawed planes that match the contours of Lambert’s feathered friends. The painting suggests de Kooning’s Excavation, whose point of departure was an image of women working a rice field, in turn depicted in Bitter Rice, Giuseppe de Santis’ 1949 neorealist film. De Kooning defined bird and fish shapes, human noses, eyes, teeth, and neck by way of a rootless structure of hooked calligraphic lines. Lambert’s migrating lines joust in a similar way, jostling between abstraction and figuration and conveying a lively interplay of forms in space.
Snow Moth is the second-largest painting in the show and a counterpoint to Bird Life. What began as a landscape inspired by a view out her studio window, where winter light had cast long shadows down a hill, was transformed when a dark moth inspired a change. Depicting wing shapes that break the horizontal hold on the painting, freeing it into a flowing open expression of pink, yellow, and orange, Lambert anchors the dreamy scene with grid patterns, which she sees both as game boards and “marking time.”
Flight Paths is perhaps the most representative Lambert’s unique aesthetic. More a wall-mounted installation than a painting, the work involves three canvases, each featuring a portrait of a single bird, placed in front of one unstretched canvas nailed to the wall. Several sculptural elements, including painted sticks, branch out into the gallery space. It’s a noisy, joyous, and raucous piece, as if derived from a heroine’s gushing aria.
Lambert’s true surrealist self is best echoed in her sculptural work. I remember visiting her Greenpoint studio a decade ago and being transfixed by her flamboyant totem-like tributes, composed of various found and painted materials. Arriving in New York City from Pittsburgh in 1995, Lambert interned in the studios of Jane Hammond and the late Mary Beth Edelson. The experience clearly opened her up to diverse practices that encompassed painting, drawing, collage, and performance. Lambert also seems to have absorbed the revolutionary, eco-conscious, and mischievous power these women embraced.
Within the main gallery is the labyrinth-like installation highlighted by several fully composed ceramic works. Miró comes to mind when encountering Lambert’s Bust Nest Fish Bird (2024). Like Miró, Lambert is exploring subconscious imagery, yet she modernizes it with a dynamic contemporary twist by placing the work on custom pedestals made of found wood that might have a bright color painted on one side. This work blurs the boundaries between abstraction and representation, drawing us into playful yet profound visual narratives.
Jigsaw offers a kinetic Cubist-like construction of shaped planes, floating circles, and branching squiggles. Flocking is a tall vase-like ceramic whose painted surface seems to have emerged from one of her canvases. Lambert embraces the plasticity inherent in ceramics, and exploring curiosities is a major part of her endeavor. We are encouraged to peer carefully inside a work like Water Jug to see an entirely glazed world within. Again, each ceramic sculpture is held up by a pedestal that amplifies Lambert’s playfulness. Within the purpose-driven cairn-like stacks are small ceramics. Many – I counted at least five – assume the shape of birds or perhaps that of Lambert’s salmon faverolles with beard, muff, and feathered feet. These have the simple brilliance of Picasso’s black and white clay pigeons.
Lambert told me that sometimes in the studio she feels as if she’s trying to trap butterflies: fleeting ideas emerge and it’s her job to try to capture them. Luckily for us, she has cast a wide net, reveling in experimentation and positioning herself as a modern inheritor who bridges eras with new creative insight.
“Emily Noelle Lambert: Wild Birds” Freight + Volume, 39 Lispenard Street, New York, NY. Through January 25, 2025. A walk-through with the artist is scheduled for January 18 at 3:00 PM.