Alice Tippit’s exhibition here made me feel, at times, like a stranger in a land of ill omens. Her humble paintings—the largest was eighteen by fifteen inches—buzzed with the efficiency of advertisements and the unease of hazard signs. Everywhere you looked was an icon of menace: a broken vessel, an engorged snake, the jawbone of some toothy beast. Low along the gallery walls was a frieze of painted water that ebbed and flowed. You were never sure if it was all cute or sinister. That either/or-ness makes her images stick; you loiter in front of them in hopes of cracking the riddle. 

This show, Tippit’s second solo outing at Patron, kicked off with a figurative bang. Sound, 2022, featured an elongated hammer bent in on itself, creating a shape that’s almost doorlike. The object is rendered more like a silhouette, beige and untextured; the style is no-frills. The background is a dingy rust gray—the color of old garage stains or casino dollars. It’s a still life stripped to bare essentials, as is all of Tippit’s work. Although it’s useless as a tool, Tippit’s hammer is exactly right as a symbol of futility. And yet the synesthetic sorcery of the painting’s title evokes the flat thwack of a nail hit on the head and lends the impotent device a purpose, even a shock of pleasure.

The premise of things being somehow off recurred throughout. In Drift, 2024, a jade-green vase was spoiled by a zigzagging black fracture down the middle. But this crack is also the source of the image’s vibratory power. Without it, the picture would be merely decorative. On first glance, Base, 2024, looked like a dark ram’s head against a bitter-orange ground. Upon closer inspection, you realize it’s a snake (the forked tongue is a giveaway) whose belly is distorted by its most recent meal—apparently something shaped like a bicycle seat. Quit, 2024, resembled the zaftig leg of a Matissean dancer who decided enough was enough and devoted herself to a life of leisure and gastronomic pleasure. 

Tippet’s method is to tweak ordinary objects to the point of perversity—and no further. Her paintings aren’t absurdist or campy so much as dully confounding. She finds the moment in which banality creeps over into enigma. Consider Float, 2023, a creamy cumulus puff against a mint backdrop. Nothing special. But the cloud is surrounded by black teardrops, painted in an exclamatory comic-strip style. Is the cloud boo-hooing? Is it lonely at the top of the world? Or is it actually a marshmallow suffering night sweats? 

Such questions suggest the serious play of Tippit’s imagery. The show’s four works on paper extended this play to the realm of language, but to heavy-handed effect. In Out, 2023, the word COUNT, rendered in a gothic or quasi-Fraktur font, lorded soberly over the word CUNT, written in lilting cursive. Below both words is a Band-Aid, as if stanching that errant O, source of obscenity and orifices. Artemis, 2023, featured the phrase MYSTERY MA’AMinterspersed with dried poppy leaves and a faint watercolor wash. These visual gags don’t beckon like the canvases do. I have no desire to question their motives, as I do with, say, Vast, 2023, a cryptic painting of an inflamed eyeball gazing up at two synchronized flocks of tears. 

Tippit’s sculptures—three of which, modest and made of wood, were included here—have their own horsepower, but even they don’t match the paintings’ jabbing poetry. Hull, 2024, for example, was a helmet of serrated hair encircling a triangle of lace, like a veil shrouding a face. It’s a fine, elliptical piece, but it felt misplaced. I hope someone—I’ll volunteer—urges Tippit to put together a show of only sculptures. Work as brisk as hers gains intensity as it accumulates. 

I’m not sure what the show’s title “The Deep Element” connotes for Tippit, but for me it called to mind a similar phrase: the deep end. As in: thrown into … or going off the … In other words, someone who is in danger of cracking up, either into laughter or from existential dread.