Lisa Lipton
Rhythm of Numbers

From November 19, 2026, to January 23, 2027
Opening on November 19 at 5 pm

Recipient of the PRIM-Dazibao production-dissemination residency (2023-2024)

Rhythm of Numbers brings together sculptures and analogue films that explore how a gesture becomes a beat, how a beat leaves a mark, and how those marks get charted. Drawing on conceptual art, percussive practice and structural cinema, Lisa Lipton cross-references “beats per minute” with “frames per second” to test ways of spatializing time. Her method is both telescopic, indexing practically imperceptible minutiae, and contingent, each proposal accommodating an exercise of the body’s movements.

At the centre of the inquiry is drumming, as materiality, technique and cultural component. Works like Jam-sync and 98, 99, 100 (Singles, Triples, Doubles) log sound’s gravity onto units that organize perception. There is also an interest in who is drumming, in the communities and lineages that define the discipline. Revisiting Ian Murray’s 1973 work Keeping on Top of the Top Song, in which a drummer performs the first ten seconds of each of the decade’s top 100 songs, Lipton’s 16 mm film These Rhythms extends this thinking to the cultural hierarchies and representational absences embedded in systems of ranking. What is recorded is important because it becomes what is remembered.

The single film frame addresses the stilling of movement for its reanimation. It captures and shapes how the image is brought back to life. Particular attention falls on abstract animation: a kind of language without subject that embodies material irreducibility. On its own, the frame is an apparition before it takes on more comprehensible and social formal systems, from graphic to televisual. Counterintuitively, it is through the permanence of sand-cast that Picture Reveal: 3, 2, 1 offers a vivid depiction of these ideas. Removed from the before and after of the film roll, and bearing the impressions of the earth, air and humidity involved in the casting process, a snapshot of figures notates a distilled, dreamlike moment of shape and image, of rhythm held still.

Lisa Lipton’s practice ranges from film and sculpture to performance and sound. She holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from NSCAD University, and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently, her work has been shown in solo shows at TRUCK Contemporary Art, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Calgary), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the University of Waterloo Art Gallery and PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts (Winnipeg). Lipton has received numerous residencies and awards, including shortlist recognition for the Sobey Art Award. Originally from Halifax / Kjipuktuk, she is based in Calgary / Mohkínstsis where she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at AUArts.