Madeleine Bialke - Significant Other

'One summer, a ranger pointed out a gigantic white pine to me on the far shore of a reservoir that I’ve boated on since I was a child. The surrounding area, the largest old-growth forest east of the Mississippi, used to be home to many of these trees before a great blow-down twenty years prior. I had always known the tree was there, the silhouette emerged ever-present above the more homogenous skyline, pleasantly haunting memories of hot summer days on sandy shores. But I had no context for it before, no idea of it as a last survivor of its kind; a remainder from an era that now can only be visualized in paintings and old photographs. These forests used to be full of giants, and the country was brimming with even wider chestnut trees before logging and a blight accidentally introduced to the continent devastated them a hundred years ago. Their post-apocalypse is our lived-in normal. But this is the only world I know, the only trees I’ve lived with.

My relationship to the white pine on the far shore of the reservoir, spanning decades, changed when I learned its history. ''Significant Other'' looks at the connections between trees and people as companion species, and some of the relationships between one living thing and another. Trees are both significant and other; dream-like apparitions that dot the landscape and loom overhead. Trees are incredibly numerous in our lives, blanketing hills and lining streets. They are quieter conversationalists than other creatures. This group of paintings blends meditative scenes from Prospect Park in Brooklyn from this recent winter and images of the old-growth forest I grew up alongside, from summer’s past. The somber, still geometry of the park trees contrasts with the more fantastical dream-like imagery of the wild forests, both displaying stability and wildness.

The settings are stitched together with a color palette designed to read more as emotion than description. Light comes from mysterious sources, prioritizing symbolic meaning or emotional resonance over realistic interpretations. The paintings posit both trees and people as characters on a journey through and over time, leaning towards each other in search of connection. The trees and figures themselves become intrepid adventurers in a dangerous unknown terrain with titles that nod to ships and sailors or space travelers, often focusing on the point where two worlds intersect. The resulting works come from a pursuit to add more context and understanding to places I purport to know, and to find reasons and ways to see them differently.'

- Madeleine Bialke