Deer Logic (2025)

In Deer Logic, Cox reflects on her own experience of sexual assault and the instinctive stillness that followed, including the moment when the body, faced with threat, does not fight or flee, but freezes. The figure, crouched and held in a faint, almost sacred light, raises antlers to her head in a gesture of forced recognition: if she becomes the deer, perhaps she can understand why she did not run. Perhaps she can make sense of the silence.

The red mark on her forehead functions both as a target and a moment of awareness — the instant of knowing what is happening, suspended just before impact. Light isolates her against a surrounding void, not to glorify the body, but to expose it: paused, compliant, and watched. What appears serene is a posture of survival mistaken for calm.

Rather than using the deer as a myth or a symbol, Cox treats it as a psychological mirror. To “become the deer” is to inhabit the logic of freezing - the state in which choice collapses, and instinct takes over. Through this self-implied portrait of paralysis, Deer Logic confronts the fragile mechanics of survival and the quiet violence of being blamed for one’s own stillness. It is not a study of surrender, but of the thin, often misunderstood line between endurance and erasure.