Exhibition: CrossLypka 2026

I recently met a guy who has this thing where he can’t make pictures in his mind from words. It’s called “aphantasia.” When I looked the condition up online, I read that doctors often describe it as being in a library full of blank books. Containers exist, but they contain nothing in their interior. This would create, I imagine, a kind of constant visual contingency, a non-fixed relationship to images in which semantic associations must be constantly reapplied. 

That came back to me while reading a text Kyle Lypka wrote in preparation for this exhibition, in which he expressed a fatigue around how oversaturated life has become with images. I feel the same way; I feel crushed by an ever-compounding density of images. It feels like we are at some kind of tipping point with the role language plays in contemporary art, the researched image, the representative image, the allegorical image—they aren’t registering anymore.

CrossLypka’s works come together without a singular directive, inviting projection. To make their work, Tyler and Kyle pass pieces back and forth, starting with a line drawing, translating to a ceramic form, and applying glazes, each work is transformed by the artists’ respective touch. The results are almost biological forms, rendered in a just-off symmetry informed by heat, gravity, and chance. Their process removes narration from the image and gets at something greater. It reminds me of something I heard Fred Moten say, reading from his poem/essay Come on, get it!: “Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.”

Collaborating with the unpredictable effects of fire, the delicacy of glass, and also each other, the resulting works have this oblique quality. I’m drawn to the space opened up by that lack. Looking at the dark silhouettes in bbbb, each defined by abutting fields of blue and yellow, I think about nature. I think about how it feels to happen upon a shell on the beach and experience that strange awareness which triggers one to stop, recognize something, and then reach down to take it in the palm of your hand.

In San Francisco, I asked Kyle if he and Tyler ever fight about creative decisions while making their work. He said not really, only occasionally. Then he said, “I guess the question we are asking is if it’s possible to share intuition with another person. And the answer is sort of, but never completely.”

In The Life of Forms in Art, the French art historian Henri Focillon proposed form as an analogue of space. Images are not always symbols meant to hold information, but sometimes a container or a transmission of some physicality. “This is our relationship” Kyle wrote about the duo’s collaborative work, and maybe that’s the information we are looking at.

—Theadora Walsh

CrossLypka is a collaborative duo comprising Tyler Cross (b. 1992 in Lancaster, CA) and Kyle Lypka (b. 1987 in Philadelphia, PA); the artists live and work in Oakland, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include In the opening, Chris Sharp Gallery (2025); 00, april april, Pittsburgh (2025); Tarantula, House of Seiko, San Francisco, CA (2024); Gravity Corner, BlunkSpace, Point Reyes, CA (2022); and I Surrender, pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA (2020). Group exhibitions include Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, BE (2025); KADIST, San Francisco, CA (2024); Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA (2023); Marin MoCA, Novato, CA (2022); and Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA (2022). Work by CrossLypka can be found in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and KADIST.