A bold new body of work examining food, body image, and the quiet ways women’s bodies are policed.

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Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery presents you should eat a burger, a solo exhibition by Austin-based artist Erin Carle. Featuring a new body of work across painting and ceramic, the exhibition marks a pivotal moment for a rising local voice whose practice confronts the expectations and coded language surrounding women’s bodies.

Drawing from her background in ballet and the culture of discipline and comparison that shaped it, Carle uses food as both subject and symbol. Burgers, cigarettes, layered textures, and stylized figures open onto larger questions of self-worth, desire, shame, and control. Bright color and visual play demand attention, while the work reveals something sharper underneath: the casual cruelty embedded in how women are judged, corrected, and consumed.
With you should eat a burger, Carle transforms an everyday phrase into the conceptual center of the exhibition. Often framed as both concern and solution, the phrase carries judgment and control. In Carle’s hands, it becomes both accusation and critique, exposing the absurdity of the standards placed on women while making room for humor, discomfort, and recognition.

“Erin Carle is one of those artists whose work immediately feels current, but also genuinely personal,” says Christina Hiltscher, Founder and Director of Unchained.Art Contemporary Gallery. “There is wit and visual pull, but also real substance. She takes something many women have heard in one form or another and turns it into a body of work that feels sharp, vulnerable, and is hard to ignore. We are proud to present this exhibition at an important moment in the development of her practice.”

Carle’s visual language has evolved from earlier explorations of optical pattern and repetition into a more stylized figurative approach with surreal elements. In this new body of work, she brings that same intensity to questions of food, body image and self-worth. The result is a series that is accessible on first encounter yet charged with tension and social critique.

“Food stands in for both desire and shame, humor and criticism,” says Carle. “Through painting, sculpture and video, I use the absurdity of food as a symbol to question the serious and sometimes cruel standards placed on bodies, especially women’s.”

Originally from Houston, Carle is an Austin-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on painting. She earned her BFA in Studio Art from Texas State University in 2022 and is currently completing her MFA at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, including VOLTA Art Fair in Basel and the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin. She is also a 2025/26 Future Front Artist Residency participant.

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Program Highlights:
•    Artist Talk with Erin Carle - June 7 | 2 - 4 PM
•    Erin Carle: What Comes Next - July 9 | 5 - 7 PM
•    Closing Reception - July 24 | 5 - 7 PM​