Alice Tippit

Grice Bench is pleased to present Still Life With Volcano, Alice Tippit’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The same ethic of understatement that supplies the poetic slenderness in a Dickinson poem can be seen in Tippit’s paintings and drawings. Within them is an economy of information, whether through an image’s limited chromatic range, or an allusive curve of a figure in vague compliance to a seemingly un-neutral ground. Some ideas –but not ideals- of femininity are present in many of the images. Finely-boned and opaque, they work on you like a Rubin’s vase illusion where no right reading can eventually prevail.

In the way you pass on literalism as a guide for poetry (there is no such thing as a certain slant of light, is there?), these works operate through hints and guesses, using metaphorical devices to limn atypical connections that might not be ones initially sought; they’re not necessarily landscapes or still-lives or portraits but they can’t be easily removed from those notions either. In their crisp aloofness, Tippit’s images course through one another with the ichor of ‘the rude, full-scale joke’; and not that at all. Pinsky was right. They leave you with more questions that are impossible to tell.

Alice Tippit (b. 1975) lives and works in Chicago. Solo and group exhibitions include: Kimmerich, Berlin; Nicelle Beauchene, New York, NY; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL, 47 Canal, New York, NY; Night Club, Chicago, IL; Carrie Secrist, Chicago, IL; Paris London Hong Kong, Chicago, IL; Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; Roots & Culture, Chicago, IL; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; Jancar Jones, Los Angeles, CA; and Important Projects, San Francisco, CA.