matt lambert’s oeuvre enacts what theorist Irit Rogoff calls “queer animations of archives” and historical rooms to map queer possibilities and potentials. Points of research interest are created through a method of cruising which is being developed by lambert. Cruising becomes a way to navigate with desire and is more concerned with movement itself and is less concerned with destination points. This is being thought through in relation to the work of José Esteban Muñoz, personal conversations with Alpesh Kantilal Patel and the 1998 documentary The Cruise. This method allows objects to be approached as producers of cartographic points in relation to Rossi Braidotti and her writing around nomadics. lambert is interested in how to document and unpack the possible, the movements and the constellations objects participate in while allowing for the slipperiness of queerness and craft to not become fixed.
Craft in this research is approached as a way of looking and living that is learned through material or process specificities, but not contained by them. This is being investigated through a polydisciplinary practice of making, writing, performing, curating, and collaborating. The practice of polydisciplanry is in reference to the work of Natalie Loveless’s work which decenters disciplinary specificity and instead asks for new ways in the university to tell stories and create new research literacies while still being able to transmit knowledge in equivalence to disciplinary specific research.
"Matt Lambert’s slippery shifting objects draw heavily from the regalia of contemporary male homosocial spheres. They impart a (re)codified identity precipitated from an atomized cloud of sport, hunting, and military references. Protective gear, trophies, marks of rank, are just a few of the mechanisms we extrapolate from these originating realms, which also cast a shadow—or perhaps contain a back room—where the ostracism of queer identities coalesces and rebounds in fetishized form. " -Timothy Veske-McMahon
Photo Credit: Jennifer Bondy
