Allison Baker | Abject Permanence

Adorned with glistening teal tongues and bubblegum stucco, Abject Permanence is a fever dream that pops with color, kitsch, and a come-hither wink, teetering between salivating desire and queasy revulsion. In an expansive exhibition of new works in sculpture, collage, and video, Baker probes how desire functions in a domestic sphere stratified by gender and class. In sculptures rendered in a vivid dollar-store color palette, flaccid silicone foliage and resin-cast gardening gloves droop over domestic furnishings stripped of their functionality. In the artist’s cut-paper collages, these uncanny objects are displaced in fantastical psychosexual geographies. By transforming the mundane forms of shelves, vases, and rugs into hallucinatory visions of domestic discontent, Baker offers a wry and humorous commentary on the way in which our possessions absorb and manifest anxiety. As the artist states: “I deploy irony and the abject in order to make space to ponder the soul crushing banalities of what many might term women’s work.”

Allison Baker is the department chair of Art and Digital Media at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. She earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Sculpture and BA in Gender Studies from Indiana University. Baker has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Random Access Gallery, Syracuse University, NY (2021), Project Project, Omaha, NE (2021), Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT (2021), Center for Visual Arts, Wausau, WI (2021), Shelter in Place Gallery, Boston, MA (2020), CICA Museum, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea (2019), NE Sculpture Gallery Factory, Minneapolis (2019), Detroit Contemporary, Detroit, MI (2017) and Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI (2014), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, SC (2022), Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis (2022), University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR (2020), Franconia Commons Gallery, Shafer, MN (2020) and Penn State University and State College, PA (2019). Allison has forthcoming solo exhibitions at MINT Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2023) and the Duluth Art Institute, Duluth, MN (2024).

This project is made possible by the citizens of Minnesota through appropriations from the Minnesota State Legislature and federal tax dollars received from the National Endowment for the Arts. Thanks to the MN State Arts Board for their support.

Gallery Hours

Wednesday - Saturday: Noon - 5pm