Debra Baxter hits a pinnacle with accomplished 'Yielded'

Only a few years ago, Debra Baxter was creating sculptures and photographs of clouds that seemed on the verge of collapse, with gravity and emotional buoyancy betraying them. Then she moved into a series of flotation devices, flirting with safety and protection. All of the work had a fear and longing for comfort pulsing through it.

Her latest show, "Yielded," with Robert de Saint Phalle, at Soil makes this life blood explicit and grounds it with her most formally accomplished work to date.

The strange weather is gone, replaced with a disturbing and mesmerizing corporeal solidity in a three-channel video and pristine anatomical sculptures. "Vocal Cords (I Love You)," is a trio of alabaster windpipe sculptures with exposed vocal cords in the process of forming those three little words.

"Untitled (Gene Simmons Inspires Me)" is an exquisitely carved alabaster tongue on a weathered and corroded foam cushion. "Untitled (Neck Crack)" is a majestic study from one portion of the video. Like its corresponding projected image, in which Baxter's sweaty neck and chest heaves, the sculpture is a beautiful and disturbing evocation of defiant vulnerability.

On the wall, the neck video bookends cropped and eerily lit footage of mud-wrestling with a serene shadow walk of the artist as an ethereal flaneur. The three pieces show emotional progression to a kind of solidity and actualization mirroring the artist's work.

"Yielded" is at Soil Gallery, 112 Third Ave. S.; 206-264-8061, soilart.org. Noon-5 p.m. Thursday-Sunday.

-- Nate Lippens