Kyle Yip: RENAISSANCE SHOW

Kyle Yip x Renaissance Show

April 18 to May 12, 2023.

Opening Reception
April 22, 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Sound Bath Meditation

with The SoundBody Collective
April 29, 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.

Exhibition essay written by Meraj Dhir.

RENAISSANCE SHOW
Kyle Yip's trans-disciplinary practice integrates eastern and western recovery-based approaches derived from gnosis and neuroscience. It plays with the new fixities of identity politics drawn from the colour-field of pop physics, combining euclidean and sacred geometry with vexillology. Some of these practices include art therapy, dreamwork, as well as meditation, reiki, and esoteric cosmological rituals that unsettle mainstream norms in contemporary art. His work addresses an urgent need in the art industry to merge explorations between personal development and avant-gardist aesthetics.

Yip achieved a significant breakthrough in 2017 when he discovered the unique ability to conceive and examine artworks that emerge during his dreams in vivid detail. He coterminously reverse-engineered these successive images that once appeared immaterial into tactile, obdurate objects.

The bands of simple Gestalt forms incorporate an aspect of both the ancient and modern world, and the overall vexillological format of the works also involves how visual attention is augmented through the practice of serial repetition. These works reveal how the unconscious has been branded by advertising formulas redolent of monotonous imagery of the commodity form. The subversive hybrid of these methods metaphorically maps a similarly disruptive kind of complex new identity.

This exhibition is generously supported by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Kyle Yip Biography

Kyle Yip (b. 1988, Scarborough, Canada) is a Toronto-based, JUNO Award-Nominated artist and audio engineer of mixed racial descent. He is internationally recognized for his highly coterminous creations of contemporary visual art, electronic music, films, and haute couture fashion originally envisioned during his dreams and pioneering the hypersurrealist movement. He was accepted into Sheridan College's world-renowned Baccalaureate of Animation Degree Program and continued his studies of sculpture at OCAD University.

His work has since been exhibited nationally and internationally, including JanKossen Contemporary in New York City, The Factory in London, Artscape Youngplace and Ignite Gallery in Toronto, Daegu Art Fair and the CICA Museum in South Korea. Yip also participated in Nuit Blanche Toronto 2015 and 2016, and The International Symposium for Visual Culture 2022.

Yip received the JUNO Award Nomination for best Electronic Album of the Year from The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for his debut album The Midas Touch in 2016. He accepted award nominations for Keepin' It Weird from the Austin Music Video Festival and Best Cinematography from the Kinsale Shark Awards, alongside artists such as Prince and The Chemical Brothers, in 2019. Yip received a four-page publication in RICE Contemporary Art Magazine Vol. 2, alongside artists such as Marina Abramović, and was nominated for Best of NewFilmmakers Los Angeles 2021. He was recognized by the Ontario Arts Council with the Exhibition Assistance Grant 2021-2022, and received the first-place award in The Holy Art INFINITY international group exhibition in London and The Art Gallery of Mississauga's 2021 Inaugural Juried Exhibition of Fine Arts. In 2022, Kyle’s work was featured in Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art Magazine and Artsin Square Magazine.