GALLIMARD YPRËS

                                                                            Gallimard Yprës

 

The Congress of Ancestral Wisdom (CAW) is an improbable provenance for a cutting edge 21^st century artist. And yet it is precisely within that cultish, hermetic community where Gallimard Yprës received her early training. Loosely predicated upon the ritualistic processes of the sand and glass paintings of the Abibe of northern Columbia, CAW inculcates its acolytes with a rigid set of non-European design principles. How else can one explain Yprës’ resistance to easy classification?

 

For over 40 years, Gallimard Yprës has been producing striking images and enigmatic texts whose affect is both destabilizing and suspicious. Central to Yprës practice is her submission to the linguistic anemia of demotic latinate speech. She seems to suggest that text, as it reluctantly collides with iconography, is placed in an impossible agon. 

 

This brilliant mise en abyme distances Yprës’ oeuvre away from European dialectical models while drawing closer to the passive nihilism of autochthonic ritual.