Gwen Comings received a BFA in painting and drawing from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2009. They currently work in sculpture and installation, with an interest in domestic interior spaces, the way people build space around themselves, and the arrangement of objects in those spaces. Comings' work is deeply informed by the experience of growing up below the poverty line in rural Minnesota, in a home with no electricity, water, nor phone. The way they explore space particularly reverberates the way people, in spite of economic hardship, build and decorate the intimate space of their home, often sacrificing functionality for affordability. They provide as an example a kitchen counter made of oriented strand board, a non-waterproof material which is usually used for cheap sub-flooring. The materials and the functional displacements at the basis of such choices reappear in Comings' work, in a way that links the memory of their childhood house to the complex relation between an object's function, its shape and materiality, and ultimately the social status attributed to it by a certain community. Further, Comings' personal experience of the tensions between purpose and decoration in a context marked by the signs of class exposes the uncanny quality of objects that fall just short of function and the sadness and severity evoked by the simplicity of their forms.