Madeleine Bialke: Mothers & Daughters

LOCATION: Visions West Contemporary - 2605 Walnut St

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Madeleine Bialke's solo exhibition, Mothers and Daughters, is showing concurrently with Jennifer Nehrbass's Pioneer Project.

Mothers & Daughters observes this post-apocalyptic natural world, and in it finds community and family ties amidst ecological devastation. The world depicted is simplified, and seen through a hazy, romantic pollution. The landscape is imbued with an anthropomorphic tone; the trees have distinct personalities and individually express their liveliness. In Red October, a young tree is christened with light against a backdrop of elder pines. In Two Slow Dancers, a pair of ancients bends rhythmically to the passage of time as dark clouds form overhead. Sometimes, hikers and animals find peace under the protective watch of the old trees. A cabin, tucked away, blends in and becomes part of the environment in One more summer. There is loss within this narrative. When all who could show the full picture have disappeared, we are left only with mythic fragments. Yet, nature is resilient and cyclical. Daily routines continue. Young saplings inevitably rise up. With any luck, they will grow tall and old, and perhaps this time we will not cut them down.

"I spent the summer on a lake in the east coast Adirondack Mountains. About fifteen minutes up the lake is the start of a large acreage of old-growth forest called the Five Ponds Wilderness area. As you get closer to the area, bedraggled old white pines start to tower over the rest of the skyline. These trees are living history and witnesses to the changes brought about in the area for some hundreds of years. They lived through the mass felling of the world's great hardwoods and are survivors in the aftermath of logging in America. Driving back to where I live in Brooklyn this fall, I was keenly aware of the stout and homogenous height of the trees along the highway, how our forests today are largely full of young trees, lacking in intergenerational variety."

(image: Red October, 2020, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 in)

The exhibition is free and open to the public, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 am to 5:30 pm. Private appointments are also available.