Commonwealth & Council presents a recently completed body of work by Kristi Lippire that grafts flattened image planes onto sculptural forms. 

Each of the composite collage-sculptures is built up around highlighted elements excised from vintage periodicals. The collages are then recomposed into new layouts mounted on clayboards, absurdly balancing in fields of flat colors. The proposed narratives are non sequiturs that keep the viewer perpetually off balanced, invoking a sense of wonder and curiosity. The grafted sculptural forms are extensions of the collaged compositions that expand into the surrounding space, floating in the gap between image and abstraction, painting and sculpture, and 2-dimensional plane and 3-dimensional space. Lippire’s collage-sculptures are spatial explosions—hodgepodge simulacra of the urban landscape of overlapping histories, architectural residues of shifting neighborhoods, and signage of our time. 

Kristi Lippire makes large-scale objects that reference the visual culture that surrounds her every day. Her work explores scale through materiality, skewing moments that emphasize humor within our complex social culture. Lippire received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University and BFA from California State University, Long Beach. Her work was included in the exhibition, Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and travelled to Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Orange County Museum of Art, and Nasher Museum at Duke University. She has held solo exhibitions with d.e.n. contemporary art and Ace Gallery and recent group exhibitions with Torrance Art Museum, Glendale College Art Gallery, and Riverside Art Museum. Lippire is an independent curator with a forthcoming F.O.C.A. project in May. She will also be in residency in Guanajuato, Mexico this summer.