Harper’s is pleased to present Lilting Dawn, Ish Lipman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a series of new works that intertwine imagined flora and urban architecture, Lipman creates surreal dreamscapes that suspend the limits of time in a fantastic superimposition of space and moment. The exhibition opens at Harper’s Apartment on Thursday, January 19, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
In Lilting Dawn, Ish Lipman presents a series of magically impossible environments: a horizon takes a lyrical turn, an underwater ruin holds the arid desiccation of a desert, a shadow is the future, a houseplant is a redwood tree. Miniature figures amble through each painting, both as the one who comes and the one who goes.
In Ocean’s Echo, a hollow house overlooks the Pacific. Its center is marked by three steps, a jarring beige break in its sweeping ochre floors. The steps are met by the sand that leads to the sea. A window frames the horizon and extends into the waters. This window is mimicked in the foreground, suggesting an invisible loop that is wandered by the painting’s figure and its shadow. The structure is a reference to the idealistic architecture of the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles, where the artist grew up. Lipman dwarfs his figure in the memory of a manmade structure in a mammoth wild landscape. The result is an exploration of the utopic collaboration and tension between nature and the imposition of human order.
Furthering the dreamlike quality of his uncanny landscapes, the artist manipulates the scale of the figure, structures, and nature to create a curious narrative that is completed by the viewer. In The Night Revisited, we see two figures and two plants inhabiting a space enclosed by windows; the horizon is clear, but the subject’s intentions are veiled. Where are they going? Are they the same figure at two different points of a journey? Lipman’s work is heavily influenced by film, and the alluring narrative presented here has a nuanced ambiguity in the mode of surrealist works like Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
Several of Lipman’s paintings suggest the passage of time in the form of ruins. In The Sky Glows a Promising Blue, cactus arms sway before a figure at three points in a quiet journey amidst semicircular remains of brick walls. The final figure moves toward a collision of sky and land or sea and floor. The seductive color of the unreachable calls to mind Rebecca Solnit’s meditation on distance and desire in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.”
Lipman’s figures search, but they meander in peace. There is optimism in the ruin and in the pause. The Old Well is not entirely dry. When one stops to pick a flower as in The Flower Picker, we feel the sacrilege of the bloom’s removal from its body, but the beauty in the marking of an end. The Morning’s Lure asks us to consider what time of day holds the most promise—an invisible sun either below the horizon or far behind us begs the notion that, as the artist says, “the day doesn’t start until the night.”
Written by Toniann Fernandez
Ish Lipman (b. 1995, San Francisco, CA) received a BA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018, and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. In 2019, Lipman attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles (2022); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2022); NADA New York (2022); Sulk Gallery, Chicago (2022); The Research House for Asian Art, Chicago (2021); and Cypress College, Cypress, CA (2018), among other institutions. Lipman lives and works in Los Angeles.