Familiar without a name

A solo exhibition by Allison Spence

Allison Spence’s practice centers on the figure of the monster and how it is used as a foil to enforce myths of a baseline, normative “human.” She draws upon intersecting histories of science, art, and horror to express the limits placed on bodies through rigid classification. Celebrating the hybrid, the mutant, and the mishmash, she makes work that’s informed by painting and collage but often exists in between media. Recently, she’s been making multilayered and double-sided paintings, which extend from or lean against the wall. Sometimes they stand on their own in space. The series crushes together collage, embroidery, text, and paint, and it focuses on a strange parallelism that has occurred between her research history and its recent embodiment within her medical history, the discovery of and surgery to remove a teratoma (or “monstrous tumor”) from her body, following ten years of referencing that medical anomaly in her work.

Opening Reception: May 2, 2026, 3-5 pm (Free and open to the public)

Exhibition on view (by appointment): May 2-May 30, 2026. Please email causewayyy@gmail.com to schedule a viewing.