Week of August 11, 2005, Issue #512
ARTS
Bombs away
By AGNIESZKA MATEJKO
From the time women are girls, they are surrounded with the expectations that
they should, could and would do it all: they would be thin, blonde, professionally
successful, have egalitarian marriages, brilliant children, and, of course,
they would be perpetually seductive. Then, somewhere along the way reality hits
home. Most women don’t reach these goals, and despite numerous accomplishments
they still feel like they have failed to live up to expectations.
That’s exactly what happened to Yorke; although a successful artist and
teacher, she always finds that there is just one more goal she should be striving
for. “I should be teaching more. I should be showing more. My thighs are
too big,” she lists off quietly. “And like most women, I am in a
constant struggle to keep up to all of these standards.” After years of
futile effort, 32-year-old Yorke realized that the goals set up for and by women
are unattainable. “You present yourself as a successful, blonde, pearl-wearing
career woman even if you are not naturally blonde, your pearls are fake and
would rather be with your family,” she explains.
Yorke has now put these observations onto paper in a hypnotic installation of
prints entitled Bombshell, but the realizations that
galvanized the show took a long time to gel. She began to observe the heartbreaking
phenomenon of frustrating ideals when she was still a young, aspiring dancer—a
path she diverged from after damaging her knees. “I was trying to live
out this idea that my body was not able to achieve,” Yorke explains. But
that was not the end of hopeless quests—as Yorke resigned herself to the
notion that she would never dance professionally, she was still faced with the
idea that ‘you have to be professionally successful or you are not worth
while.’ She strove valiantly to achieve professional success as an artist,
to be respected in her community, to have economic stability. And she won: Yorke
obtained a permanent position as a professor in printmaking. However, her husband
had to move to Chicago, and she had to follow—or lose her happy marriage.
“There was a lot of tongue clicking about that,” she recalls. “You
shouldn’t do that, leave a job as a professor at a university to get married.”
Still, Yorke left and even began to teach as a sessional instructor in Chicago,
but with that change, the whole perception of who she was professionally diminished.
“I teach my classes in the same way, but my time is less valuable, and
my input is less valuable.”
As Yorke began looking at how she measured success, she realized that she was
not the only one, and that most of the women she knew were striving to fulfill
societal expectations that were frequently elusive and contradictory. That’s
when she decided to depict this quandary in the most dramatic way she could—through
her art.
Yorke created an intimate little room as warm and enticing as a nest by printing
wall-sized images of hair on delicate sheets of paper and hanging them so they
fill the small space of the gallery. The paper gently undulates in the breeze
of your steps, turning it into a kind of oasis of beauty and calm. But, as you
stay in the room a funny thing happens: The blonde hair begins to feel claustrophobic;
the strands begin to seem like jail bars. Yorke likens this to all the ideals
we try to achieve, they may be desirable and enticing in theory, but once you
get there, they can suffocate.
“If those ideals weren’t appealing, nobody would attempt to achieve
them,” explains Yorke, adding that the draw of the quest is almost irresistible,
and the falseness is not easily detectible. We have all heard about those mythical
women who have done it all. The fact that they may not actually exist is not
easy to discern—after all, the public mask of the professional, happily
married, seductive woman with successful children is hard to take off. “You
present yourself in a way that’s not true to your private experience,”
says Yorke as she dares to take off her own mask and reveal her vulnerabilities.
That’s something she decided to do after years of trial and frustration.
“It came as a shock to me that I couldn’t have all of these things,”
she explains and adds, still a little hesitantly. “Maybe nobody can.”
V
Bombshell
By Jennifer Yorke • SNAP Gallery • 10309 97 St • To Sept
3