Nancy Mladenoff

For Between the Lakes, Madison artist Nancy Mladenoff has created five paintings addressing the constantly changing dynamic between species—flora and fauna—in our midst. Mladenoff’s first painting of the series, called Vortex, includes images of wine glasses, sparrows, creeping snowberry, wild indigo, and cockroaches. Reading about the history of Madison and thinking about her surroundings, Mladenoff became interested in the species that have existed here for thousands of years and in the species that were introduced, sometimes to harmful effects. The European Sparrow is one such bird. First brought to the new world by Europeans who longed for remnants of their former life, this “street bird” as it came to be known, was introduced to Madison in 1877. Its aggressiveness and penchant for eating voraciously soon meant that it had driven away many of the other species that live in the city.

Another painting in the series, called Undertow, depicts elongated renderings of docks, birds, butterflies, bugs, and algae. Algae is one of the most important environmental issues affecting the lakes today. Mladenoff chose to juxtapose three kinds of algae, namely swift-waterpond weed, curly-leaf pondweed, and the toxic blue-green algae. By mixing the good, the benign, and the harmful, Mladenoff asks us to analyze the dynamic of life forms around us.

View work by Nancy Mladenoff