ESS Envy

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Ess Envy, the first New York solo exhibition by Chicago based artist Alice Tippit.

For this exhibition Tippit continues to explore language and the construction of meaning. While her paintings initially register as signs or signifiers, meant to allude to the probable presence or occurrence of something else, each composition retains a purposeful ambiguity that celebrates and rewards potential slippages between readings. Integrating stylized anthropomorphic and geometric forms to oscillate between positive and negative space, figure and ground and surface and depth, Tippit forecloses any immediate legibility. By staging these simple, and often monochromatic elements as elusive elements, the artist examines and challenges how we interpret and assign meaning to images, icons and symbols.

Often rendered in a clean, hard-edged style, many of Tippit’s paintings contain visible brushstrokes and slight color variations that not only reveal the artist’s hand, but aid in shuttling the works between the abstract and concrete. Tippit’s idiosyncratic use of semiotics allows for potential metaphors, references, and associations to exist within as well as between the individual canvases. Suffused with humor and a sense of melancholy, the works fluctuate between polarities of truth and artifice, yielding fragments of a poetic and somewhat subversive visual lexicon.

Alice Tippit (b. 1975) graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Night Club, Chicago, IL; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; 47 Canal, New York, NY; Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; IL; Roots & Culture, Chicago, IL; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; Jancar Jones, Los Angeles, CA; and Important Projects, San Francisco, CA. Tippit is currently in a group exhibition at PSM Gallery, Berlin.