Caroline Cox fills both exhibition rooms in the gallery with complex installations of precisely reconfigured and discretely placed objects she has culled from the flotsam and jetsam of the fashion, fishing, agricultural and floral industries. As always with Cox’s work, the transcendent beauty of her installation will belie more cerebral issues. Cox reminds us that what we see and feel at an organic, perceptual level is real enough, but so too are the culturally driven associations that give “meaning” to those sensual experiences and sometimes limit their potential impact on our lives.

The materials Cox selects for her work reflect this persistent dualism. Their intrinsic materiality is both elegant and persuasive, but their odd familiarity reminds us of their deep roots in our everyday lives. Marshalling a small flotilla of glass cylinders filled with water and crystal balls, and inundated with floating translucent blue circles cut-out from the New York Times delivery bags, Cox creates in the back gallery a constellation of contingent forms reminiscent of molecules or growing cell clusters. The shifting light through the lenses of glass and water, the shifting shapes moved by the water itself, become metaphors for transformation already suggested by Cox’s studio alchemy.

In the front room, Cox has created a veritable forest or underwater seascape of dangling, clinging, climbing falling organic forms out of the most prosaic of objects. She uses everything from polyester “horsehair” tubing used in the millinery industry, Fishermen’s monofilament line, heavy net bags used with produce, acrylic balls, glass magnifying lenses and rubber tubing. None of these materials call attention to themselves, all recede into the compelling whole, yet none loses their individual identity either. Cox, never cuts the 30 yard skein of horsehair tubing, for example, but tugs from it a balletic performance through the creation of thousands of looping rock climber’s knots.