In adjoining rooms inside a project studio at the Clocktower Gallery, Caroline Cox juxtaposed two installations; Spin, a sprawling, immersive work made of hand sewn white vegetable packaging mesh is sited in an all black environment, and OrangeBlueOrange is a piece that emphasizes saturated colored shadows cast in part by acrylic balls that simultaneously reflect their surroundings.
Both works grew organically out of Cox’s improvisational process where manufactured objects are repeatedly altered and manipulated in ways that subvert their traditional function while documenting their subtle interactions with such natural phenomenon as light, space and gravity. By entwining associations tethered to recognizable objects with topologies of the material world Cox explores perception, questioning the relationship of subjectivity to physical matter and phenomenon.
Cox also installed ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, Remix in the reception window of the Clocktower Gallery. This piece is comprised of hundreds of glass lens suspended over an array of convex and concave mirrors to create a kaleidoscopic, ever mutating optical field.
"Although you don’t literally leave the ground, the sculptures’ pulsing aureoles do their best to convince you otherwise. One moment you’re in the institutional-white hallway of a neglected municipal building and the next you’re among star clusters and jellyfish, crepuscular clouds and aggregating amoebae.
Cox melds a sculptor’s sense of materials, solids and voids with a stage designer’s gift for lighting and space. In her work, which consists of synthetic netting, mirrors, lenses and clear acrylic balls, abstraction is less a distillation of form than an analogy for the textures of life." - Thomas Micchelli for Hyperallergic.
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Caroline Cox was born in Reno, Nevada and grew up in Sacramento, California. After graduating from Sacramento State University with a BA in Painting she moved to San Francisco, where she helped develop a woman’s artist cooperative. During this time her work changed from painting to installation as she became aware of the experimental work being made in the bay area.
In 1980 she moved to New York and started showing work at Rosa Esman Gallery, and attended art residencies at Edward Albee’s The Barn, and Het Apollohuis in the Netherlands. After living for ten years on the lower East Side in Manhattan she moved to Williamsburg and became involved in the burgeoning art scene, took part in exhibitions such as Salon of the Mating Spiders at Test Site Gallery, and participated in the all night event, Organism, at The Mustard Factory.
From 1996-2001 Cox and her artist husband Tim Spelios ran a Williamsburg gallery, Flipside, showing innovative local artists. Cox has continued to exhibit her work in NYC at venues such as White Columns, the Kitchen, PS122, The Sculpture Center. In Brooklyn, Cox has exhibited at Pierogi Gallery, Smack Mellon, Long Island University, Sarah Bowen Gallery. Other venues have included Yale Univ. School of Art, CN; Wake Forest Univ., NC; The Lab and Don Soker Gallery, in San Francisco, CA. Cox will have a one person exhibition in September 2012 at FiveMyles gallery in Brooklyn.
This program is part of the Clocktower Gallery's Emerging Artist Residency Program, made possible with the generous support of the Jerome Foundation.
