“The drawings began with two words ‘FEAR’ and ‘FUN’. “  It was the onset of COVID, and Todd Lambeth’s partner had remarked “That’s it, there is no more fun”. It was a time of  fear. We were all asked to stay at home, and Lambeth, temporarily abandoning his painting practice, took out a pad of Bristol paper and began making small, intense pencil crayon drawings at the kitchen table.

As Covid escalated so too did our anxiety regarding a myriad of  fears, and Lambeth’s words, often appropriated from song lyrics and popular culture, further challenge our horror and our angst. THEM; LIE, LIE LIE; FAME, FAME, FAME; DEEP SHIT; SICK. Speaking to culture and our place within it, Lambeth’s borrowed words from television, social media, Iggy Pop, and the Sex Pistols, further our discussion regarding the social issues to which they refer.

During this time Lambeth suffered from a temporary eye disorder, and became interested in his resultant fractured and disrupted binocular vision. He remarks that the drawing SEE SAW  documents his sense of vision at the time, “the flipping and flopping of my eyesight”.  Employing this, along with his long-standing painterly interrogation of colour and how it operates within our visual field, he became fascinated with how the text and the visuality of each drawing  collided, creating a tension between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’.

Strung together in this accordion folded book work, and read aloud, the words in the individual drawings now take on yet another rhythm, that of conceptual poetics.

Todd Lambeth lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. He studied visual art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and received his MFA in studio art from the University of Victoria where he currently teaches drawing and painting. His work has been exhibited across Canada in both commercial galleries and artist-run centres. In recent years he has participated in exhibitions at Gallery Jones (Vancouver, BC), Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC), The Penticton Art Gallery (Penticton, BC), Open Space Arts Society (Victoria, BC) and Chernoff Fine Art (Vancouver, BC). Lambeth is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and his work is held in private, corporate and public collections including the Alberta Art Foundation, Nordstroms and Shell Canada.