Asher Grey Gallery is pleased to present “SOFTLY,” a solo exhibition by Joshua Tree–based artist Coco Hall.
A sculptor and toy designer at heart, Hall works fluidly between sculpture, soft wall pieces, and playful object-making.
A graduate of Bennington College in sculpture, she founded a cottage industry producing her own designs, including winged baseball caps and stuffed toys shaped like fruits and vegetables known as Vegimals. In her hands, toy design and fine art are not separate disciplines but interconnected expressions sharing the same conceptual DNA.
Hall’s practice consistently intertwines with her environmental and animal rights activism. Drawing imagery from contemporary culture and ideas rooted in feminism, consumerism, and environmentalism, she reflects what she describes as the “wonderful/horrible” nature of our world.
The soft materials she favors—fabric, stuffing, pliable forms—create a toy-like visual language that invites viewers in with familiarity and humor before revealing deeper tensions.
“I believe my job as an artist is to reflect what I see,” Hall says. Humor, for her, is not decoration but strategy. It opens the mind, allowing difficult truths to surface gently. The softness of the materials becomes both aesthetic and conceptual: disarming, approachable, and quietly subversive.
The exhibition title, “SOFTLY,” speaks not only to materiality but to method. Hall’s work suggests that transformation need not arrive with force. Echoing Leonard Cohen’s words, “There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in,” her sculptures and wall works hold space for contradiction—tenderness and critique, delight and discomfort—revealing light through the seams.
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