Alison Yip at Galerie Noah Klink

Artist: Alison Yip

Exhibition title: Soma Topika

Venue: Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, Germany

Date: September 16 – October 17, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Alison Yip approached a neoshaman and a psychic with an identical set of questions. She inquired about her future, her relationship with the gallerist hosting the exhibition, the title and the techniques or material she should use. Following multiple in-person and remote sessions including a stone oracle, two shamanic divination journeys, several card decks, and a coffee grind reading, Yip obtained some answers. These answers became part of a chain of interpretation as they turned into her medium to produce meaningful images, prefiguring painting’s own process of mediation.

Two distinct and contradictory scenarios emerged and gave rise to two series of small oil paintings envisioning parallel futures. In accordance with the respective readings, Yip painted one series on various pieces of metal, and another one on marble-print laminate floor tiles layered with collaged scraps of paper from her daily life. A marionette-like figure representing the artist is seen in Milan or in her hometown of Calgary — she is writing her first novel or working at a swan boat rental, marrying a rich Italian man of fashion instead of the woman she truly loves, or reluctantly unpacking a special edition scarf for an upcoming exhibition.

Yip’s pictures exert a plasticity reminiscent of Northern Renaissance paintings and their nonlinear approach to perspective. In her genre scenes, figures are incongruously contained within the pictorial space allotted to their bodies and the objects that surround them, while the thin membrane of the vignettes allow the predicted scenarios to bleed onto the more tangible reality of the substrate. Pinned to the plastic covered walls of the gallery in mid-renovation, these scenarios belong to a wide array of provisional narratives — the kind we all construct to bricolage our way forward.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Tiziana La Melia.

Alison Yip is based in Cologne. She received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, CAN and a MFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, DE. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Fly Robin, Fly, Mécènes du Sud, (Montpellier-Séte, FR, 2021); Bare Heel Country, Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, DE, 2020); I SAW A CROW, ORCA WAS I, Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver, CAN, 2020); Flow My Tears, Christopher Tracy, ACUD (Berlin, DE, 2020); We Love You, Beursschouwburg (Brussels, BE, 2019); Motoko Ishibashi / Alison Yip, Lady Helen (London, UK, 2019); and Hi-Ventilation, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Harburg, DE, 2019).

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, Who or what will I desire? (Auratic), 2021, oil, metal, 45 x 33 cm, 17 3/4 x 13 inches

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, What new skill will I develop? (Auratic), 2021, oil, copper, 25 x 36 cm, 9 7/8 x 14 1/4 inches

Alison Yip, Where will I live? (Auratic), 2021, oil, metal dust, aluminum, 43.5 x 25 cm, 17 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, What animal/organic form will I connect with? (Auratic), 2021, oil, metal, 24 x 30 cm, 9 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, How will my relationship be with the gallerist? (Somatic), 2021, oil, paper, laminate tile, 31 x 42 cm, 12 1/8 x 16 1/2 inches

Alison Yip, How will my relationship be with the gallerist? (Auratic), 2021, oil, metal dust, steel, 39 x 27 cm, 15 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches

Cups of Tears & Walking Towards Soma Tropika

Guided by consultations from Aimée Dawn Robinson, Whitehorse, YT/Vancouver, BC
By Tiziana La Melia

Who is the boss of my dreams? Anne Sexton
Excerpts from diaries, bills, calendars.
Imagine these stanzas as parallel realities, beat matching and mixing a patched up future. Avatar: life drawing doll with a bucket on its head.

I asked u: what do you say when someone asks u what your 10 year plan is? U told me that you bought a watering can recently
u put a lot of thought into it before buying it.
U said u only imagine
3 months into the future
and when u buy an object, u visualize
how u will move it and this determines
the acquisition.

September 6, 2021
It’s another trash lettuce new moon poem
& it lands on labour day
& this one is really hard.
There are not enough cups to catch all the lacrimal. Walk away with me
towards the water.
Will you hold my hand?
I want to hold yours.
There are 8 cups on my bedside table
filled with water and tea.
For most of my life
I would only drink
when my mouth was parched.
I really believed that:
only drink when thirsty.
Night time = water time.
Sleepsipping
Sipsleeping
Water me?
Did we both fall asleep to a tramp stamp?

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, What new skill will I develop? (Somatic), 2021, oil, paper, laminate tile, 31 x 21 cm, 12 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, Who or what will I desire? (Somatic), 2021, oil, paper, laminate tile, 31 x 21,5 cm, 12 1/8 x 8 1/2 inches

DIAPHANOUS EARTH, MUSHROOM HEALERS, PROFITEROLE, IRL FRIENDSHIP, STRAWBERRIES, LOVE,
TERRA COTTA, TERRA VERDE, TERRA CELESTE, SLEEP, CONFIDENCE
ROCOCO OR RUST
JOY
EMOTIONAL DREAMS,
THE PATH OF VULNERABILITY

Sometimes you doll
with a bucket on your head.
You doll so clearly
you sensory deprivation float tank operator. You swan, to feel
the connects clearly.

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, What animal/organic form will I connect with? (Somatic), 2021 oil, paper, laminate tile 31 x 57 cm, 12 1/8 x 22 1/2 inches

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Alison Yip, Where will I live? (Somatic), 2021 oil, paper, laminate tile 27 x 41 cm, 10 7/8 x 16 1/4 inches

What will nurture us?
Text is the trick
to cut fantasy with dirt
wing tipped creatures,
reading in the clouds.
We are almost on earth
holding figs in the kitchen.
Sgraffito intersections of material
and verse
mix the colours of the earth.
We are flighty, ether-kitey.
She said that in a past life
whatever puppies passed between us
as litter mates
or married or as grandparents sharing a child whatever we did before, it’s kinda coming up now. In the deepness
shiver away.
PatchWork Soma Release

What we identify will not come into the text or be revealed.

Password: What colour is the fabled sky? spookyblue

August 20, 2021/ September 6, 2018
I borrowed your question and also asked: What will cause me great embarrassment?

Money-making; more of it or less of it.

How will I be valued?
Will we redistribute it?
Wait, the only reason why you think it’s good is because somebody bought it? Is it monastic to paint, to poem when it’s to make money?
(Do you want it to be?)
(Ace of Pentacles, upright)
If I appear before you
but I am not here
I’m sitting on a star
or what you might call poem dust.
She wanted to interact with the architecture that was named after insects. She wrote that she felt at times like a silky carapace.
Everything fell silent.
It was an effort from this point, unclear.
Looking at the sunset through a cup of tea
a slice of lemon was enough of a moon.
We were finding a way to return to the sun
only this was based on the speedy
teetering of buff men who
sealed themselves off from the dust world.
It was as though their blood
gushed with DDT.
Did her comportment repulse the girl
though she was certainly her true ally?
They were both kind of rough and
lived in multiple temporal registers
in front of a night sky. Prior to sky and darker than sky.
Sepia, sepia into sepia.
Counterentropy

Alison Yip, Soma Topika, 2021, exhibition view, Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

IS THE RAINBOW ALIVE?

If you don’t cry, what happens to all of your tears?

USE DADA TO LET GO OF papa? or pump up the animas & beginner’s mind.

Hardened tears = duct rust?
SOME PEOPLE BLOCK YOU IF YOU CRY

Stress hormones come out in tears. TEARS = CORTISOL RELEASE

It’s part of the adrenal system. TRY IT.

Cortisol is one of the main ingredients in our tears and it’s one of the only ways that shit comes out (if kept in the body/the body will say no, eventually). Different cries produce different chemical tears. The cries of grief have a different chemical compound than stress/ than sadness/ than happiness/ than glitter tears. Please juice.

It’s ok for us to be on the planet.

Alison Yip, The Body Says No, 2021, polyacrylic scarves, plastic, metal, hemp, 86 x 70 x 41 cm, 34 x 27 1/2 x 16 inches