Palo Gallery presents Rachel Wolf’s first solo presentation, featuring new installation, sculpture, and paintings. The exhibition, titled My My My Tintals and Fishscales is an exploration of materiality, language, and physicality. Wolf created this series of artworks over the last three years for her Cooper Union MFA show in 2023, and this is the first time these works will be presented as a collective body of work.
Wolf’s practice explores themes of documentation, repetition, variation, and the blurring of boundaries between organic and inorganic objects and materials. The artist is fascinated by the rules and parameters of structures, particularly the boundaries that various structures impose, and the symbiotic relationship between objects and their containers. Wolf explores forgotten and ignored materials, from dead insects to soap, using them in her work and placing them amongst found, natural materials like bone, bark, and moss. The focus on material and its potential relationships with other elements creates artworks that are both delicate and resilient in their ability to refocus the viewer’s attention toward the physical world.
In My My My Tintals and Fishscales, the viewer is presented with the duality of order and chaos. The walls are not hung with predetermined plans, but rather filled organically. At the center of the exhibition is The Hut – a dwelling-like installation covered in dried glass noodles, made to resemble a marketplace, or an imaginary shed in the woods that exists as a repository for foraged materials. Inside is a collection of Wolf’s latest soap sculptures – otherworldly objects made to resemble a celestial being, underwater spores, or an entirely new ecological amalgamation. Fragile mobiles and obscure organic objects float around the gallery. These intricate sculptures are pieced together from found organic materials – such as moss, cow teeth, dried flowers, and honeycomb – with inorganic materials, like wire and plastic tubing, to secure their structural mechanism.
Language, through collaged text and word play, plays a vital role in the artist’s practice. Wolf often marks her sculptures with poetic pairings of adjectives and nouns that challenge the materials and boundaries at play. Through her work, Wolf aims to create a biosphere that exists outside of the viewer's reality, where objects find their homes and form essential relationships with their containers.
