Kyle Yip
I am a Canadian, JUNO Award-Nominated hypersurrealist artist of mixed racial descent internationally recognized for my highly coterminous creations of visual art, electronic music, and films originally envisioned during my dreams. Since a 2006 Arts York Visual Arts Graduate Exhibition at Frederick Varley’s residence, my work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. My trans-disciplinary practice integrates both eastern and western recovery-based approaches drawn from cognitive and dialectical behavior psychology such as art therapy, dreamwork, Gestalt therapy, shadow work, and sleep hygiene, as well as contemplative sciences such as meditation, reiki, and shamanic rituals that unsettle mainstream norms of contemporary art.
The idea for this work emerged from my recovery through various therapeutic modalities to counter the major depression and insomnia I was working with as an artist. My work addresses an urgent need in the art world to merge explorations between personal development and avant-gardist aesthetics.
I achieved a significant breakthrough in 2017, when I discovered how to consolidate my studies of psychology and neuroscience with my painting and sculpting practice within different states of conscious awareness — from different stages of restful awareness and sleeping to dreaming. I am able to perceive then examine these artworks which emerge during these states in vivid detail. The underlying formal structures I am exploring have as much to do with the hypnotic, subliminal, and meditative arrangement of repetitive commodity formulas used in marketing displays and web-based media as they have to do with avant-garde aesthetics and cult images. In an age of the computer screen, a mode of interfacing that has become prevalent in our reading and viewing is this sort of "scanning." This is how we are conditioned to screen information today, visual or other: we scan it (and it often scans us, counting webpage hits, storing demographics, and tracking keystroke inputs.) Everything in our world seems subject to processing through mechanical reproduction and electronic simulation to the point where distinctions between man-made and machine-made are difficult to distinguish. This tension between visual arrest and scansion within different states of awareness can reveal how the unconscious has been visually colonized by advertising infrastructures redolent of monotonous imagery of the commodity form. I see these works as both the diagnosis of a cultural condition, but also a means for the viewer to explore the states of awareness congruent with those experienced in its creation.
