You're So Pretty!
In collaboration with Austin Art Projects, HOHMANN is pleased to present an exhibition of installations and sculptures by Carson Fox.
There is something quietly subversive about the way Carson Fox approaches sculpture. At first glance, her works appear almost weightless—delicate, even decorative—but spend a moment longer and they begin to unfold into something far more complex: a meditation on nature, memory, and the fragile architecture of ecosystems. In the current exhibition, a focused presentation of wall-based installations alongside a selection of individual sculptures, Fox reveals a practice that is as materially inventive as it is conceptually grounded.
Fox is best known for her intricate, site-responsive installations—works that seem to grow directly out of the walls they inhabit. Constructed from cast rubber, resin, and found botanical elements, these compositions mimic the organic logic of vines, roots, and fungal networks. They spread laterally, cluster, dissolve, and reassemble, creating environments that feel simultaneously natural and artificial, familiar and faintly uncanny. In this exhibition, four distinct wall installations anchor the presentation, each calibrated to its architectural surroundings, each proposing a different rhythm of expansion and restraint.
What distinguishes Fox’s work is not simply its visual resemblance to nature, but its underlying structure. These are not illustrations of plants, but systems—networks that suggest the invisible processes governing growth, decay, and regeneration. There is an echo here of ecological thinking, of interconnectedness and interdependence, yet Fox avoids overt didacticism. Instead, she allows the material itself to carry the narrative. Rubber becomes skin, resin becomes sap, and synthetic pigments oscillate between the seductive and the toxic.
The wall installations are complemented by a series of freestanding sculptures that distill these ideas into more contained forms. If the installations operate like environments, these sculptures function almost as specimens—fragments of a larger system, isolated for closer inspection. They retain the same tension between control and entropy, between the hand of the artist and the suggestion of autonomous growth. In their compression, they reveal the precision behind Fox’s practice, the careful orchestration that underlies what initially appears spontaneous.
There is, inevitably, a conversation here with art history. One might detect distant affinities with the post-minimalist explorations of artists like Eva Hesse, particularly in the use of unconventional materials and the embrace of organic irregularity. Yet Fox’s work feels distinctly of its moment, informed as much by contemporary ecological discourse as by sculptural precedent. Her installations do not merely occupy space—they negotiate it, adapt to it, and, in a sense, reimagine it.
What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is the interplay between the site-specific and the autonomous. The wall works insist on their dependence on place, while the individual sculptures assert a quieter independence. Together, they form a dialogue about context, about the conditions under which forms emerge and persist. It is a subtle but persistent reminder that nothing—whether in nature or in art—exists in isolation.
Fox’s work resists spectacle in the conventional sense. There are no grand gestures here, no overwhelming scale designed to impress at a distance. Instead, the exhibition rewards proximity. It asks the viewer to come closer, to trace the lines, to notice the small ruptures and connections that hold each piece together. And in doing so, it offers something increasingly rare: an experience that is both visually compelling and intellectually resonant, without ever insisting too loudly on either.
In a moment when conversations around nature often veer toward the catastrophic or the sentimental, Carson Fox occupies a more nuanced territory. Her work acknowledges the beauty of natural systems, but also their instability—the constant negotiation between growth and collapse. It is this balance, this quiet tension, that gives the exhibition its particular charge.
One leaves with the sense of having encountered not objects, but conditions—states of being that continue to evolve, even in stillness. And perhaps that is Fox’s most subtle achievement: to make sculpture feel less like a fixed form and more like a living proposition.