“Confessions on a Sparkling Hill” combines recent works from Alison Yip and Tiziana La Melia to explore the ways in which the surreal insinuates itself within our daily life. An interest in narrative—and more specifically, how we use storytelling to reframe the world around us—dominates the exhibition, permeating the low-key strangeness of the artists’ sculptures, paintings, and video and multimedia works.
Yip’s Untitled (Dyson Staubsauger), 2023, wraps a broken Dyson vacuum cleaner with blue ribbons, leaving just enough exposed plastic from the suction hose to assert and negate its presence. The artist thus uses packaging as a metaphor for how we bind concepts together in order to define our experience. The appliance is not the only object Yip endows with a new material existence: Untitled (Geschenkekorb), 2023, swathes cellophane around an assemblage of a Champagne bottle, a stuffed toy rabbit, and an upside-down top hat—perhaps to keep the magic from leaking out—while Untitled (Uggs), 2023, suspends a linen bundle of the eponymous boots above the steel door to the bunker room where La Melia’s works are on display.
For Transits of Fantasy, 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 ritualistic practices of rural societies. The work is a reminder that ritual itself is a kind of packaging: We define reality by the ways in which we selectively bundle our world.
— Piero Bisello
