Laura Soto’s first solo exhibition at The Box, “FIXATION: PROCESS: RITUAL,” offered visitors entrée into her singular world: a goopy, glossy, pastel universe of decorative objects (in anything but the pejorative sense), all forged through obsessive acts of accumulation and excavation. Nearly sixty works made between 2016 and 2024 were installed across three spaces and ranged from wall- and pedestal-mounted shells, to canvas books and tabletop sculptures, to a series of large and small works on acrylic panels. In their exuberant excess, marine motifs, and insistently feminine palette, the works oozed a Rococo sensibility—one not plucked wholesale from the eighteenth century but filtered through the aesthetic of Instagram feeds dealing in micro trends in nail art, vintage lingerie, and flat-lay arrangements of shells and rocks. The result was sculpture distinctly of and for the internet age, offering tactile temptation and optical pleasure in equal parts.
In the gallery’s entranceway stood subaquatic satellite, 2018–24, a shield-shaped totem that seemed to mark the threshold to a holy place. Its gooey surface was encrusted with barnacles, drips, and blobs, the product of layers of acrylic, oil, watercolor, glues, resins, wax, silicone, paper, polymer, plaster, pigment, glitter, and insulation foam. Like many of Soto’s sculptures, series of which bear titles such as “mollusk,” “anemone,” and “fossilized sensorium,” the work appeared dredged from the ocean, a time traveler from a post-Anthropocene era in which coral has been replaced by technological refuse. The dread of impending climate collapse was tempered, however, by Soto’s use of signature soft pinks and purples, and a pale silvery gray that made everything feel hazy and subdued—a vision of the future that recalled Her (2013), Spike Jonze’s prescient sci-fi romance, whose candy-colored scenography was meant to take the edge off of dystopian AI anxiety.
In Soto’s work, psychological distress is transmuted into sculptural forms. As the press release notes, “her process begins from potentially self-destructive anxious habits [presumably skin picking, a disorder most often associated with OCD] that have been reformulated into rituals of remembrance and transformation.” Indeed, the more complex shapes nestled into subaquatic satellite and other sculptures in the exhibition clearly came from a number of wall-mounted shells with pockmarked lunar surfaces, their trypophobia-triggering scars a one-to-one match for the hundreds of excised chunks that reappeared elsewhere. Some of these core samples wound up enmeshed in veils of plastic and pigment, while others were affixed to densely populated acrylic panels (creating an intriguing interplay between opacity and transparency) and the pages of books made of canvas. The largest of these volumes, aptly titled Catalogue of Excavation, 2019–23, was studded with sculptural samples arranged in satisfying grids, resembling a collector’s album of geodes or a scientist’s codex of polymer types.
Soto’s migrating matter called up art-historical references, too, from Hannah Wilke’s chewing-gum sculptures to the dizzying mosaics of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. But her process of making—culling from one work to feed or graft onto another—is distinctly bionomic, producing what she refers to as a “regenerative ecosystem.” In the harmonious symbiosis she cultivates, one object’s wound becomes another sculpture’s body, trash retooled as treasure, trauma as ornament.
Despite the richness of the material world Soto conjures, the exhibition remained resolutely object centered, with each sculpture resting on a pedestal or hung at a distance from its siblings, never quite merging into the next. The closest the show came to installation art was an arrangement of the sculptures into the loose composition of an altar, but without the necessary mise en scène to hold it together. The formality of the presentation counterbalanced the work’s extravagance, but I found myself wanting more: for the gallery’s expanses, its floors and white walls, to be blanketed in dripping wax and polymers, for my own body—and my mind, distracted by the world outside—to be consumed by the sticky embrace of Soto’s aesthetic.
