Alison Yip: Soma Topika

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Alison Yip, "Soma Topika," 2022

Spring Exhibition Party Friday, April 29 · 6:00 PM → 8:00 PM

Please join us this Friday evening to celebrate the closing of Alex Morrison’s Nooks and Corners and Alison Yip’s Soma Topika (both closing May 1) and the opening of Michelle Bui’s Mutable Materialism (on view until August 28). All ages welcome! Cash bar.

Alison Yip: Soma Topika

Across her work in painting, wall treatments, writing, and sculpture, artist Alison Yip moves between the observational and the speculative. Known for an ongoing concern with the ambiguities and ambivalences of figuration and perception, Yip’s works often evoke transitional states, mystical forms and psychic or spiritual phenomena to consider the disconnected ways humans experience time, space, self, and relationships.

Reflecting on the radical systems failures and temporal shifts of the current moment, Yip’s most recent body of work, Soma Topika, led the artist to look for ways to envision alternative futures. Undertaking parallel divinatory processes, Yip engaged both a neo-shaman and a psychic, posing to each an identical set of questions about her life, relationships and desires. From this, she produced two sets of intimate oil paintings, depicting herself in each as a poseable mannequin in scenes that interpret the concurrent yet contradictory readings delivered to her. Rendered on unconventional substrates—scraps of metal for the psychic’s predictions and laminate floor tiles for the neo-shaman’s—Yip presents these works at CAG amidst a gallery under renovation, offering a scene that is as provisional and unfixed as the futures she seeks.

Alison Yip‘s multidisciplinary practice finds ways of speaking to the dispersed nature of our cognitive apparatus, often working from the psycho-phenomenal origins of figuration. Ambivalent tensions are evoked through a mix of withholding expressions, over-used or popular imagery and various pictorial modes. Yip holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, Canada. She continued her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany and in 2016 received an MFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. Recent solo, collaborative and group exhibitions include Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin; Mauer, Cologne; Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; ACUD, Berlin; and Lady Helen, London.