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RED HOOK, NYC

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On View: Doliolida
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Doliolida
Rachel Wolf
^{1/31/25 - 3/05/25}

I began this work wanting to create something transparent, which holds two images. One from below and one from above. I thought about how, from below, humans have given drawing to the stars and created tales. The atmosphere is a screen that catches our projections. But what does that projection look like from above? What are the tales on the other side? The wire is the division between what we can see and what we cannot. As the equator is down for the northern and southern hemisphere, the wire is up for the northern and southern vision. From above and below the idea is you are always looking through the same lens– however, the collages that define the wires’ structures change depending on your own orientation.

I held onto this idea, but it bled in a way that things relating to nature do. My work tends to be aquatic in aesthetic. I sway towards creating objects that could be species. Objects that levitate between flora and fauna. As the wire unfolded into form it took the shape of a dome– domestic enough not to resemble the sky, but to resemble a jellyfish or the underwater view through goggles as you look up and see air weighing down the sea. Seeing the ocean from below creates silvery film that traps our visions. This inversion is like seeing the constellations from above. 

Doliolids are ovular plankton which end in two siphons. They are non-picky grazers with coincidental consumption, who levitate between flora and fauna. I found their structure and saw more of my piece in a doliolid than in the sky. However, like the atmosphere, doliolids are strainers, selecting what stays on the inside and creating new compositions on the outside. Weaving from below, I decided what they absorb and what they expel. The wire skeleton mimics celestial coordinates and bind constellations. As if the atmosphere is a digestive system and the stars have stayed to be absorbed within our dome.