Artists Erik and Melissa Wolf stand next to Buttercup, a wool-covered sculpture, one of the works in the siblings’ exhibition “Figments to Figures” at PLUG Gallery.
Memory is perhaps the most slippery part of what makes us who we are. In “Figments to Figures,” siblings Melissa and Erik Wolf explore the imagined and remembered lived experience of their Mexican family heritage. The exhibition’s eight drawings and sculptures constitute a personal 3D map and form a personal folklore filled with animals and objects tied to childhood memories and identity.
Melissa departs from her past mixed-media sculptural work often constructed with concrete. Instead, she uses felted wool on cut foam forms for Buttercup and Twin Heelers, larger-than-life figures with soft curves and toy-like appeal. As children, we’re drawn to physical objects and creatures both much smaller and larger than us as we self-reflect and assess our place in relation to the world. Melissa’s otherworldly works, like Saturday morning cartoon characters come to life, spark delight and invite playful interaction. Indeed, a posted sign suggests, “Pet Me Gently.”
Play is behavior that actively works out social cues, rituals, roles and steps in a process. As children, we inherently play and are taught to play. Melissa’s work nudges viewers to drop restraint, cross a threshold and reconsider how and when we allow ourselves to play.
These two sculptures also bring to mind Foster’s rule, or the island effect, a contested concept in evolutionary biology, where members of a species grow smaller or bigger depending on resources and predators in the environment. Melissa recently departed her crammed studio filled with concrete forms and supplies at PLUG for a forthcoming artist-run studio. With this showing, perhaps these oversized works signal a readiness for further artistic growth and experimentation with scale and materials less impeded by environment.
Melissa and Erik invite viewers to explore their manifestation of childhood memories tied to landscapes in Mexico. The siblings acknowledge that stories embedded in her sculptures and works like Erik’s oil pastel Dual horse and Toro are dreamlike representations of shifted and blurred recollection, forms of collaborative and self-directed mythmaking. A horse and its stars and Within a dream of stars and darkness share a distant dialogue with Marc Chagall’s vivid day-dreams. Erik’s bold linework establishes rhythmic movement. Off-kilter stars and round shapes form their own constellation, a wide-awake nod to night skies above their grandfather’s land in Mexico.
Long-term memories, particularly childhood memories, are subject to consolidation at formation and then reconsolidation — a hypothetical construct that describes a memory trace temporarily subject to plasticity. Information originally coded to the memory may be changed, strengthened or weakened as part of retrieval and reassembly. As the Wolfs convey, memory doesn’t merely surface intact like a buried time capsule extracted from the ground. When time passes and life experience accumulates, new information shapes the original memory.
More than engaging in roleplay, Melissa and Erik act as explorers, geographers, interpreters and, ultimately, conquerors recalling and reclaiming figments and fragments to superimpose layers on mental maps come to life.
“Figments to Figures: Melissa and Erik Wolf” continues at PLUG Gallery, 1328 Agnes Ave., to Nov. 1, with a closing reception from 3 to 6 p.m. Open by appointment. For more information, plugprojects.org.
