Alice Tippit: The Deep Element Exhibition Preview & Walkthrough

Wednesday, September 11
6:30-8 PM

Patron Gallery
1612 W Chicago Ave, Chicago IL 60622

Join us at Patron in West Town for an exhibition preview and walkthrough of Chicago-based artist Alice Tippit's solo exhibition The Deep Element! Tippit deftly uses color, image, and language in a looping game of “yes, and...” continually twisting what we do, don’t, and think we know. The Deep Element embraces the gallery space itself, with a single mural element that flows along the east side of the gallery, a watery frieze set at floor level. Her signature intimately-scaled paintings, collaged works on paper, and wooden wall sculptures—a recent expansion of her practice—share this environment. Tippit’s works for the exhibition are steeped in thinking about the inadequacies of language when confronting our interior landscape.

The complex psychological relationships we have with others—much less ourselves—are basically impenetrable without calling upon seemingly unrelated phenomena to describe the sensation. Emotions swell, they flood, they wash over the beach of the mind; figures of speech that allow us to allude to mental states that threaten to overwhelm us, but these are also clichés that have become nearly meaningless in their ability to capture our imagination. As far as Tippit is concerned, images serve us better, offering a flexibility to communicate where the poetics of language fail.

^{PHOTO: Alice Tippit in her Chicago studio. Courtesy of the artist and Patron.}