Street Scene I

“Street Scene I” by Nancy Mladenoff is from a series of paintings that reveal the gendered social constructs around domesticity and insects. The series, called “Gender Revisions II: The Giant Species Series,” was produced between 1995 and 1996. The compositions the artist created as part of this series feature an alternate reality inhabited by gigantic insects, which women and girls find of interest rather than threatening or gross. Here we see a woman staring with interest out of a first-floor apartment window at a huge ant as it rounds a street corner. “These young females are portrayed as curiosity seekers creating their own reality,” the artists stated, “not as innocent bystanders living out society’s idea of what girls may or may not be capable of.” Each composition is painted atop store-bought fabric commercially-printed—here, with green grasshoppers, but in other examples dolls, lace, toy stoves. This melding of the realms of the domestic and the entomological, along with the shift in the insect’s scale, presents a surreal scene meant to motivate the viewer to question their reality.