“I Surrender,” with work by Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross, showing September 12th - October 2nd 2020 at Pt. 2 Gallery (1523b Webster St. Oakland, CA 94612)
How can a meditation be sexy? This is a funny thought to me. I mean… isn’t it? Isn’t sexiness an arousal that makes your heart beat fast? And meditation quite the opposite? -- a slowing down to a state of controlled steadiness? In “I Surrender,” up at Pt. 2 Gallery through October 2nd, Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross bring this unlikely pair into a balanced union to create: a sexy meditation.
When romance evolves into a true union, each body ceases to lose itself singularly in a moment of passion -- both instead losing themselves in a new type of grounded being: a partnership, a coexistence, or in Lypka and Cross’s case, the act of creating. The artworks of “I Surrender” are an invitation extended by the two sculptors to step foot into their intimate partnership as both artistic collaborators and lovers.
At first I find nothing unusual about the labeling of the duo-show on the catalogue that I pick up at the gallery entrance, and then I realize: every single piece, photographed, titled, priced, is listed as created by both artists. No single piece is listed as made by just one of them. Are Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross truly laboring in balanced harmony on every single artwork they produce? Likely, I think not. But conceptually, these minds have met, and labor and craft feels equally balanced through all pieces in the show -- so however they define “working together,” they seem to have achieved a symbiosis of sorts.
Equal exchange; balance; grounding; weight; physicality; mortality: the very materials with which Lypka and Cross craft bring viewers down to Earth -- yet it’s not a crashing down, it’s a soft pull; a recognizing; a dawning of awareness. Using aluminum, steel, wood, porcelain, epoxy clay, ceramic, and enamel, Lypka and Cross for the most part create monotone color sculptures. At times, they scatter small, brightly colored body parts and other simple forms across a grid or grate of steel. Are the body parts graphed across an X-axis timeline? Is this a reference to our mortality?-- the fact that we won’t exist on this earth forever? Or perhaps, the grid-like form cages these body parts, representative of a struggle against the limitations of entrapment in human form. Yet instead of a spiraling into existential crisis, this show feels perhaps like the ending of an existential crisis-- an arrival, a letting go, an acceptance of these facts.
Walking through the array of body parts standing, balancing, crawling, atop pedestals, I am grounded by their materiality and weight, and find myself entering into their recognizable forms: I am the pair of small hands stuck within a steel grid, the green Gumby legs traversing across the x-axis of a chain-link fence, the two aluminum feet, cast mid stroll-- a dangling cock and balls hanging at the meeting of calves -- no other body parts attached.
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross. “Steppin Out.” Cast aluminum. 5 x 7 x 5 inches. 2020.
Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross. “Time As Solid.” Steel, epoxy clay, wood, and enamel. 52 x 47 x 4 inches. 2020.
Monkey bars act as a connector between the limbs in “Climb All Over Me,” offering an even more physical entry point. I feel myself shrinking, becoming two inches tall. I zap onto the pedestal, stare up at the bars above me, and hop-- my hands make quick fists, catch -- release -- catch-- release, as I grab from one bar, to the next, swinging, swinging, away from a giant’s feet and towards its hands supplanted on the ground as only the most flexible of athletes can do when bent over in stretch. The size of this athlete: an Olympian god, perhaps. Yet “Climb All Over Me” doesn’t exude a feeling of playground competition. Instead, I feel a playful edge of whimsy at the monkey bars, and a romance from seeing the union of feet + hands sans torso. It feels elemental, reduced to basics. In fact, the limbs of “I surrender” have this effect, of feeling perhaps so elemental that we cannot help but inhabit them, and ground ourselves in their aluminum, steel, and clay. Of the earth, we return to the earth.
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross. “Climb All Over Me.” Cast aluminum. 6 x 8 x 4 inches. 2020.
Lypka and Cross boil things down to simple forms to increase our understanding of what it means to be, and to connect with another. Connection: as reptilian an ancient animal instinct as any. Forgoing a conceptual deep dig into theory, Lypka and Cross don’t overthink what love means: they accept what it means to be human, and just be. Lypka and Cross’s sculptures invite us into this: a grounded meditation and acceptance of self within one’s body and in union with another’s.
The ceramic buckets of “Flood 1” and “Flood 2,” are clumpily formed in the most-basic-child-like sand-castle-at-the-beach-way. They look like they were perhaps meant to catch rainwater, or be filled with homemade stew, yet crafted so porous that the liquid seeped into the buckets themselves, disturbing their forms, pulling them, dripping a slow sludge-y return to the soil.
Kyle Lypka and Tyler Cross. “Flood 2 (Bucket).” Ceramic and glaze. 12.5 x 9 x 5 inches. 2020.
In “Fruiting + Nutting,” puckered lips lock two faces together in more than an innocent kiss: some sort of reproductive ritual?-- two forked tongues rise up wave-like, outlining the shape of a labia. Sure, sex is another word for it, but without the smothering overtones of colonial culture’s over-eroticized, capitalistic embellishments. In “Fruiting + Nutting,” I view sex as ritual union. So “Fruiting + Nutting #2,” -- a flaming cock sitting solo on a pedestal all to itself -- caught me by surprise. It felt a bit too, well, silly. Yet on second thought, I recognized an underlying level of irony throughout the show. Lypka and Cross walk you through a meditation with sincerity, yet with a playful edge of tongue-in-cheek: there’s a level of self-reflection, and I’m aware of the artists’ presence throughout the show. Scattered throughout the show are a few simple shaded drawings on graph paper-- mostly rough conceptual sketches for the sculptures they turned into. Sketch “Moon Watching #3” stands alone, without accompaniment of a sculpture. Chancing a nighttime skinny dip, a naked butt dives into a belly of water. The “artists at work” are here alright, and they’re goofin’, but I’m okay with that. A flaming cock -- a symbol of pure passion: it’s funny and stupid, but it’s also the simple one-liner that I find myself accepting from each piece in the show. It’s okay to just be human.
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross.”Fruiting + Nutting.” Ceramic, porcelain, and glaze. 31 x 18 x 8 inches. 2020
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross.”Fruiting + Nutting #2.” Ceramic and graphite. 3.5 x 3 x 3 inches. 2020
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross. ”Moon Watching #3.” Graphite on paper. 12 x 9 inches. 2020
“Dream Talk” also has a witty edge-- it resembles a butterfly born of earth and rock. Circles like wings extend from either side of its torso, dotted in their centers, like the evolutionary adaptation of “eyeball” spots on butterfly wings to scare away predators. A rock with the lightness of a butterfly, seemingly poised to take flight. Grounded, it cannot leave this earth, but perhaps it has achieved a meditative state of nirvana. Has it ascended because it is so fully grounded? There is some poetic irony here.
Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross.“Dream Talk.” Ceramic and Glaze. 15 x 18 x 5.5 inches. 2020.
Lypka and Cross call for this kind of ironic ascension. A giving in to bodily form and desires; a way of being, a way of making that transcends self. Yet in all their togetherness, they don’t shut the viewer out. Lypka and Cross’s sculptures almost call to viewers to feel what it might be like to occupy them from within-- to give in, to surrender, and to become them.
Lypka and Cross further increase accessibility to their work by democratizing its purchase and ownership. In the second room, a table sits cluttered with ceramic sculptures. These were crafted small so as to be priced low, making it more financially feasible to leave the show with a small piece of it weighing down your pocket: a tangible feat of grounding.
