ART GALLERY OF REGINA

​Cindy Baker has spent ten years dreaming and recording her dreams.

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Even in sleep, Baker's activities centre around the artworld and are tinged with chagrin. In her artwork Dream Come True, she recalls dreaming of a plastic coin imprinted with the image of a cartoon duck she purchased on layaway from a commercial gallery: "I went to pick it up and pay for it, and it was $10. I wondered why I hadn't been able to pay that amount years ago but realized that we didn't have PayPal that long ago, and that I'd never carry that kind of cash."*

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Baker and collaborator Scott Smallwood animate objects and scenarios first glimpsed in the artists' dreams with sound, electronics and performance. Banal yet unworldly objects—ranging from a sink overflowing with ropes of jewels to an enormous inflatable duck-shaped chair—are accompanied by a ticker board spelling out the contents of Baker's dream journal and a continuous and evolving tapestry of voices created by Smallwood.​

 

Sound, intangible and elusive, is an analogue for the exhibition's themes. It envelops gallery visitors in the intimate contents of Baker's dream journal, revealing the unpleasant and intractable connections between dreams, memory, and trauma.

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Things I've Forgotten is based on Baker's childhood memories of abduction and includes an endurance performance in which Baker pedals an adult-sized Big Wheel tricycle to power a speaker. Baker explains that pushing her body to its limits serves to exorcise long-buried trauma. 

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Things I've Forgotten requires the artist to continually spin her wheels to power the dream soundtrack, never advancing beyond trauma. Like Baker's use of the cutesy signifiers of childhood, dreams are absurd, disarming and unsettling.

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Who is more powerless or more free than the child or the dreamer?

 

*Baker, Cindy. “Things I’ve Forgotten.” Cindy-baker.ca, https://www.cindy-baker.ca/work-2014/things-ive-forgotten-2018. Accessed April 30, 2025.