Joshua Liner Gallery

Press Release

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Tiny Drama, an exhibition of new paintings by the South African artist Candice Tripp.This is Tripp’s first solo show with the gallery.

Working in oil and ink on canvas,Tripp creates a precisely realized view of childhood that at first glance seems nostalgic, even precious. Medium-sized and uniformly square, for the most part, the nineteen pictures of Tiny Drama all depict small, finely rendered scenes of child figures in bucolic settings against a white background. What viewers quickly come to understand is that this pictorial technique is entirely ironical, mimicking the culture’s tendency to minimize the difficulties and dilemmas of childhood. If adulthood represents the successful repression of childhood traumas, Tripp’s project is to force the return of the repressed through a suite of clever, fable-like vignettes.

In The Honey Trap, a boy wearing a pig mask is tempted to follow a trail of pink cupcakes toward a bare, menacing tree. In Sometimes the Skull Monkeys Break Out, not-yet-controlled impulses are literalized as a pack of monkeys escaping from the back of a girl’s head. Though wearing adorable outfits, the children all have blue-tinted skin, an arresting clue to their internal states of mind. All hide behind animal masks that when dropped reveal not faces but a whirling miasma of indistinct form and smeared paint—this action can bring both conflict and relief, as shown in Tiny Drama and The Luxury of Being Left Alone for a Little Bit. By contrast, the one image with no child and a discarded mask, The Last Known Whereabouts of Penny Stone, takes this stand-in for socialization to various unsettling conclusions.

Tripp uses these details to great narrative effect, but a psychological payoff is what she strives for. By isolating the scenes against a white field of negative space, she condenses and intensifies the presence of each tiny drama, much like the goal of “dream work” in the practice of depth psychology. In referencing the construction of personae through the use of masks and fantasy, the artist suggests that childhood is not so much a time of innocence but rather an intense, often perilous negotiation with the world.

Born in 1985 in Cape Town, South Africa,Candice Tripp currently lives and works in Newcastle, United Kingdom. Solo exhibitions of her work include Home IsWhere The Telly Is, Lazarides 77 Quayside, Newcastle (2008), and Candice Tripp, Electrik Sheep, Newcastle (2007). Selected group exhibitions include The Arrival, Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke, UK (2009);Outsiders, Lazarides Charing Cross, London (2008) Lazarides 77 Quayside opening group show, Newcastle, UK (2007).

Artist
Candice Tripp

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Kris Kuksi and Candice Tripp opening photos (November 28, 2009)