“Confessions on a Sparkling Hill” combines recent works by Alison Yip and Tiziana La Melia to explore the ways the surreal insinuates itself into our daily lives. An interest in storytelling – and more specifically, how we use storytelling to reframe the world around us – dominates the exhibition, permeating the understated strangeness of the artists’ sculptures, paintings, and video and multimedia works.
Yip’s Untitled (Dyson Staubsauger), 2023, wraps a broken Dyson vacuum with blue ribbons, leaving just enough exposed plastic of the vacuum hose to affirm and deny its presence. The artist thus uses packaging as a metaphor for the way in which we link concepts to define our experience. The device is not the only object that Yip endows with a new material existence: Untitled (Geschenkekorb)2023, wraps an assemblage of a bottle of champagne, a stuffed rabbit and an upside-down top hat in cellophane – perhaps to keep the magic from escaping – while Untitled (Uggs), 2023, hangs a linen bundle of the eponymous boots above the steel door to the bunker room where La Melia’s works are on display.
For Fantasy transits, 2022, La Melia dipped heritage corn in dragon’s blood resin and raw beeswax collected by the artist in Grande Prairie, Alberta, among other materials, referencing the ritual practices of rural societies . The work reminds us that ritual itself is a kind of wrapping: we define reality by how we selectively wrap our world.
