Artist Alison Yip was a three-year-old girl growing up in Northwest Calgary when Saskatoon’s Mendel gallery debuted a show by American post-modern representational painter Eric Fischl. The show became a watershed, not just because Fischl went on to become one of the towering art stars of the 1980s but because it showed Western Canadian painters that there was a human option to the two solitudes of abstraction and landscapes that had so dominated art in the West. Flash forward twenty-five years and Yip, now a 28-year-old painter, has completed her first solo show at Vancouver’s Monte Clark gallery. There is no disputing that the images are Fischlesque in their anthropologically honest portrayal of humans spied unawares during a day at the beach. But it’s Yip’s sense of exploration—be it through her painting or her utilization of the seemingly forgotten disciplines of collage and pencil on paper—that shows Yip has some of the sense of purpose that made Fischl a star all those years ago.— Neal McLennan