Stanek Gallery's OUTSIDE THE BOX program is pleased to present Soft Monsters, a new body of work by Brooklyn-based artist Carson Fox. Best known for her colorful, whimsical installations and sculptural practice, Fox introduces a cast of anthropomorphic creatures that feel both strangely familiar and delightfully unknowable. Resembling animals only in fragments, these hybrid beings occupy a space between the lovable and the bizarre, the absurd and the endearing. They are not monsters to fear, but companions born from intuition, curiosity, and transformation. Fox's sculptures emerge through an improvisational process. Rather than beginning with a fixed image, each work evolves organically, allowing the material itself to suggest its final form. "The shape tells me what it wants," Fox explains. "The sculpture moves on its own more or less until it has a voice." Armatures built from foam, plaster, papier-mâché provide structure and support for the layers of pigment infused resin and colorful sands of her unexpected shapes. The works embrace gesture, texture, and playful invention, arriving at forms that feel animated by their own internal logic. The artist draws inspiration from an expansive catalog of interests that includes nineteenth-century ceramics, American folk art, modernist color theory, and the traditions of quilting. Rather than directly referencing these influences, Soft Monsters channels their emotional and material sensibilities, allowing inherited ideas about color, protection, and storytelling to quietly inform the work. Part animal and part invention, these creatures seem as though they might wander into a backyard from another world, awkward, curious, and impossible to classify. Their exaggerated gestures and improbable anatomies invite both laughter and empathy, encouraging viewers to embrace uncertainty and delight in the unfamiliar. In Soft Monsters, Fox transforms humble materials into expressive beings that celebrate intuition over imitation, reminding us that identity often reveals itself through the act of becoming. Soft Monsters opens Friday, September 18, with an artist reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at DFN Projects, 41 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022.