Alice Tippit: Bad Form

Opening Reception: Saturday 5-8pm

Paris London Hong Kong is pleased to present Bad Form, the second solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Chicago artist Alice Tippit.

The manufacturing of meaning is at the root of Alice Tippit’s practice. Her emblematic and simply rendered images can be taken as signs or symbols, but they circumvent literal interpretation and allude to something other. Reduced to the essential, her compositions shift between positive and negative space, figure and ground, and surface and depth, avoiding immediate legibility. Tippit’s idiosyncratic use of semiotics brings out potentially metaphoric references while allowing associations to exist within and between individual works.

In previous exhibitions, Tippit has used specific objects in her installations to set an overall tone for the work. In Bad Form, a set of decorative door pulls is attached to one wall. The pulls—devoid of lock or latching mechanism—are used when ease of entry is required. Stripped of their usefulness, they acquire symbolic value. The scrolled shape is echoed in multiple works; a visual rhyme that mimics the logic of language even as it is subverted by the ambiguity of Tippit’s images. She situates her work in the realm of the poetic, urging us to examine and challenge how we assign meaning to the everyday.

Alice Tippit (b. 1975) lives and works in Chicago where she received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. She has had solo and group exhibitions at Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon, 2017; Kimmerich, Berlin, Germany, 2017; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 2016, 2015; Paris London Hong Kong, Chicago, 2015; Night Club, Chicago, 2016, 2014; Jancar Jones, Los Angeles, 2012, 2011; and Important Projects, San Francisco, 2012. Opening on January 12th, Alice will be featured in "10", a group exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, New York.