Art with an eye on bugs and fungi
6:18 PM 10/23/03
Amanda Henry Wisconsin State Journal

The makings of the world's coolest science museum are on display at two Madison galleries right now. <

You can get bug wild at the Wisconsin Academy Gallery, where Jennifer Angus' installation "The Observation Room" pins exotic insects into whirling wall-scapes of color and form. <

At the Wendy Cooper Gallery, Nancy Mladenoff's "Hush, You Mushrooms" turns everyday toadstools into the kind of fanciful fungi Alice might have stumbled upon on the other side of the looking glass. <

Both women are UW-Madison professors, and though they have interests in entomology and mycology, respectively, and a healthy respect for the environment, their first allegiance is to art. Which may be why their takes on nature are so fun. <

Weevils and cicadas and grasshoppers, oh my!Jennifer Angus was born in Nova Scotia, studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, and spent years in Asia, indulging her lifelong passion for pattern by documenting tribal textiles and tattoos. <

It was in Thailand that Angus, 42, first thought of mixing bugs and fabric, after discovering a garment embellished with metallic beetle wings, among other gewgaws. <

At first, bugs were just a piece of the puzzle. In large-scale mixed media works, Angus combined cloth, photography, beadwork and a few insects. The bugs were intended to evoke the Victorian fondness for specimen collection, which extended to their encounters with other cultures - an idea Angus played on in the accompanying portraits of non-Westerners. <

Gradually, bugs began to supercede both the textiles and their socio-political slant, until Angus was creating all-bug installations. The central rubric, however, remained the same: pattern. <

"It's very exciting to me to see the potential pattern has," says Angus. "And it works in our culture, too." <

In the Golden Triangle area of Asia, she notes, different patterns are used to indicate tribal affiliation, marital status, maternity, etc. The equivalent in this country, says Angus, would be the way that, say, the wearing of a tiny floral print might have caused her to write off this interviewer as prissy. (Note to self: Burn that secondhand Laura Ashley smock.) <

"I buy into the idea that pattern communicates something," says Angus. "Pattern in my mind equals a routine - we understand, we have the framework." <

In a home crowded with colorful rugs, wall hangings, beadwork, cricket cages and ornate chests, Angus stockpiles her bugs. They come in cellophane packets, ordered from insect dealers in far-flung places. The first step is to "relax" them. <

In a homemade "humidity chamber" - also known as Tupperware - Angus rehydrates the bugs. <

"After about three days you can move their limbs and put them in any position you want," she says. <

Once wings, legs and antennae have been displayed to full advantage, the bugs are allowed to dry out again. Some are easier to work with than others; grasshoppers, with their dropsy legs, are the most time-consuming. <

There are stacks and drawers and bins of carefully pinned bugs in Angus' studio, ready for their close-up. Determining which to use in a particular installation, and how to configure them, has a lot to do with the space at hand. <

In "The Observation Room," for example, she was intrigued by the fact that the gallery building used to be a clinic, with two-way mirrors, and so incorporated a series of open circles in her design. Many of the insects have transparent wings. <

"It seemed to me that it should be about light and transparency," says Angus. <

The airy grace of the installation is surprisingly pretty, for a room full of bugs. From a distance, visitors sometimes mistake her work for old-fashioned wallpaper, says Angus. <

On closer examination, the eye begins to resolve the pattern of transparent wings next to those in shades of cabbage green and dusky pink, magenta and olive, pale peach and buttery yellow. These are not butterflies - crunchy exoskeletons cover big, juicy, gut-filled bodies - but with their arcing antennae and wings akimbo, the chorus of bugs looks like the work of an insect Busby Berkeley, whose minions are about to dance. <

"A lot of people may not feel like they know about art, but when they walk into this environment, they feel a connection," says Angus. <

To those who worry that Angus is depleting the world's jungles of interesting insects in the name of art, she points out the vast reproductive capacity of bugs - as well as the fact that she buys only from reputable dealers. <

And for those who wonder how she can handle bugs bigger than your average rodent - the "ewww" factor - Angus makes a strong distinction between the scurrying and the dead. <

"Like most people, I don't especially like insects when they're alive," she admits. "No one really likes that scurrying feeling." <

The non-living bugs, on the other hand, are no more spooky to Angus than a blob of paint. <

"Those could be sitting in front of me at dinner and I wouldn't mind," she says. "It's fairly frequent that we'll be sitting at the kitchen table and we'll find a leg." <

Funny fungiNancy Mladenoff likes to fill a wall with bugs, too. In her case, though, they're painted on, not pinned. And in the last few years, the bugs have had to share space with mushrooms. <

"Nature, and the landscape, has been kind of overdone," says Mladenoff, 46 (and, like Angus, a graduate of the Art Institute). "I had a desire to kind of push the envelope - you know, can we still use nature as subject matter, and push it a little?" <

She was interested in mushrooms, but didn't want to simply paint them, in the traditional sense. So she decided to paint on them. <

Her first painted mushrooms didn't last long. After painting the tops and then snapping a digital picture, Mladenoff washed them clean so that the next wanderer would find their toadstools pristine - as opposed to thinking they'd stumbled on some kind of miracle of nature. <

As she learned more about the mushroom kingdom, Mladenoff realized that painting the cap of a mushroom was no more damaging than painting the outside of an apple. She began to try more elaborate patterns, and spent more time perfecting the digital photos of her work, achieving a high-enough resolution to enlarge them dramatically. <

A painter by training, Mladenoff was now working in a hybrid form of her own invention - half paint, half photography. <

"Whenever I get into something, I kind of get into it," Mladenoff admits. Case in point: Her sizable collection of mushroom-shaped salt and pepper sets is on display in the window of the Wendy Cooper Gallery, a touch that is more whimsical than kitsch. <

Although Mladenoff has taken to palling around with serious mushroom fanciers, and identifies an underlying environmental concern in the making of art about nature, her work with fungi is anything but serious. <

Compared to the nature-based work of Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, featured in the recent film "Rivers and Tides," Mladenoff's mushrooms have a sassy, punk sensibility. There is no aspiration to 100-percent organic purity, or to passing as the real thing. With their electric colors and thick dollops of paint, these mushrooms don't hide the fact that they've been made. You're supposed to do a double take. <

"The work I do in the studio is very slow and painstaking, and a lot of it's pretty planned out. But when I go out in the woods and do this, I don't know what I'm going to find. It's my way of being improvisational," says Mladenoff. "I'm looking for ways to entertain myself." <

The tension between "real" and artistically altered is nothing new for a painter like Mladenoff. <

"We're always playing with illusion or non-illusion," she says. Working with digital technology makes the equation even more complex. <

"When I started showing these, a lot of people thought I did the manipulation in the computer," says Mladenoff. She wants people to know that the mushrooms and the paint were really there, even if they're not "real" in the evolutionary sense. <

"I want it to be real, but fake." <

The bug-to-mushroom continuum is a pretty clear one for Mladenoff. <

"Part of the fascination for me, both with insects and mushrooms - I'm really attracted to these kind of small, unnoticed things in nature - is that there's a love-hate relationship with these things," she explains. "People either love the beauty of them, or they're disgusted with them." <

Mladenoff, obviously, leans more toward the unconditional love end of the spectrum. She doesn't mind if her mushrooms are small or strange or potentially poisonous. She isn't painting them to make them look better, exactly - just different. <

Of course, as her mycological knowledge has grown, Mladenoff has encountered one hitch in her purely formal approach to mushrooms. <

"When I find something that's really delicious, I'd be less apt to paint on it," she admits. "I'll just take it home and eat it." <