Please help celebrate the final week of the Sticks and Stones exhibition at Linda Warren Projects. Carson Fox will give a formal talk about the work.

ABOUT THE SHOW:

Fox’s interests reside between the natural and the artifice, the tension that exists between the two, and humanity’s interest in controlling time and the great Dame Nature. Part of the exhibition will feature labor intensive sculptures consisting of blades of grass (hand cut & hewn together into patches), rocks (resembling geodes and quartzes of unusual formation), and bundles of sticks made from an array of colored cast resin. Each of them symbolize and point toward the friability of American culture. Clean cut grass and the perfect bundles of sticks find discomfort within their artificiality, suggesting that control is both elusive and a fantasy. The objects are trapped within their materiality, as if longing to find their true yet unobtainable “living” nature. “History preoccupies me in small and grand terms. My interest in time has been a consistent subtext of my practice and the natural forms I select — the formation of rocks and minerals, the rings of trees — all mark time.”

By contrast, the artist will present a wall installation of recent works on paper devoid of color yet equally obsessively engrossed with the notion of time and process.

Fifteen 8” round portraits will hang along the gallery walls. The prints originated as steel-cut engravings from the Victorian era, a highly stylized artform with prescribed textures, specific dots, dashes, and cross-hatchings which rendered the images with surprising realism. Fox deconstructs these prints with intricate and complex patterns of small penetrating holes which speak to the notion of lace-making. By deliberately punching out their disappearance, Fox contemplates not only this antiquated process, but the printmakers and the sitters themselves. This artistic process, that was once current and prevalent, is now dead and forgotten in obscurity. Her engagement with these prints reinforces the irony that time is working to erase her too.

Gallery X will showcase Gold Rush, an 8’ x 12’ expanse of over 1,800 gold rocks suspended in midair. The glistening cloud of floating nuggets welcomes the viewers with the pleasure of belief before true circumstances unfurl. The faux rocks modeled after pyrite (fool’s gold) reference the great American gold rush of the mid 1800’s that drew thousands westward and many more to their demise. Viewers can walk under and around the installation as these small objects flicker against the walls. The spectacle of it all is both beautiful and misleading, and an ode to the great American dream.

Carson Fox received her masters of fine arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, her BFA from University of Pennsylvania, and a four- year studio certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Arts and Design, The Royal Museum of Belgium, the Noyes Museum of Art, the Newark Public Library, the Jersey City Museum, the Morris Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado, the Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, O. K. Harris Gallery, New York, the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales, the Brunswiker Pavilion Kiel, Kiel, Germany, and the Association Mouvment Art Contemporain, Chamalieres, France. In 2009, Fox completed a permanent public art project commissioned by the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the Seaford LIRR Station in Seaford, NY. Fox has received grants from the University of Rhode Island, the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, a Willem Emil Cresson Award, and a New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper. In 2015, Carson Fox finished a major public art installation at the University of Arkansas for their newly complete math and science center, Champions Hall.

Carson Fox is represented by Linda Warren Projects in Chicago, IL and Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Fox lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This marks Fox’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

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Tags: Carson Fox, Chicago, Gallery Y & X, Illinois, Linda Warren Projects, near west side, Sticks and Stones