Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, presents a new installation, Just Add Water, by Caroline Cox. The exhibition runs from May 12, 2009 through June 20, 2009, and the opening is on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 6 – 8pm. The gallery will be open to the public Monday through Friday 9:00 – 6:00, also Saturday and Sunday 10:00 – 5:00, and by appointment. The Kumble gallery is located in the Humanities Building lobby.

Just Add Water is a site specific project made for LIU’s glass walled Kumble Gallery. During the run of the exhibition Cox will add on to and reconfigure her translucent installation as she carries on a conversation with the gallery’s elliptically shaped, transparent architecture.

Cox began the piece last summer by experimenting with hundreds of thin, 4 ft. long glass tubes. Accidental breakage led to the transformation of the individual rigid tubes into a connected pliable mass. This mass of tubes have become the structural basis for the sprawling walk through constructions and dense clusters that together will run the expanse of the gallery and hang from ceiling to floor. Stacked and overlapping, the intensely layered components create ever shifting optical fields that work in concert to capture streaks of light; conveying a sense of being engulfed by a fractured crystalline structure.

Just Add Water continues Cox’s practice of improvising with a collection of manufactured materials and everyday objects. For her new work Cox has culled objects from science, fashion, and the occult. These disparate items are combined and reconfigured; utilitarian functions are subverted while cultural associations are interwoven. Glass tubes (used to make lab equipment) give off shimmering reflections of light; plastic roller picks (used to curl hair) are now the primary structural node; and crystal balls (used to foresee the future) conceal and reveal blasts of color.

Within this context of juxtaposition and alteration Cox further isolates the tubes’ basic materiality in ways that amplify the glass components’ interaction with gravity. Pink picks and electric blue monofilament create flexible joints that give the glass mass a subtle kinetic quality, allowing the installation to respond and adapt to the shifting stresses on its internal equilibrium.

Mutability and transformation precede any fixed forms as the installation shifts between objective observation and subjective allusion. Embracing ambiguity, intuition and circumstance…Cox entangles the viewer within a relative universe ever sensitive to the fragile and chance nature of experience.

Susan Canning Tangle-Optical catalog essay 4/07

Cox lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions, including: Green Hall Gallery at Yale University School of Art, Schroeder Romero Gallery, Smack Mellon, Pierogi Gallery, Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, Sarah Bowen Gallery, Sculpture Center, Rupert Ravens Contemporary, and White Columns. Cox was also co-founder and co-director of Flipside Gallery in Williamsburg.