About
Artist's Statement
My work is about our often-unsuccessful attempts to understand the world through appearances, which offer us both more and less than we expect. Most of us deeply want to understand a fragmentary world as whole and to imagine our fractured selves as complete. Through collage, itself a medium of conjoined fragments, I conflate fashion's celebration and distortion of the body with our more day-to-day experience of its flaws and failures. Despite our best efforts to create controlled, socially-appropriate selves, our bodies are leaky vessels, often filled with unruly desires. I demonstrate the absurdity of our efforts at control through humor—and the humors that seep from my fashionable figures. The moments of duality and uncertainty that my work at once represents and creates are moments of possibility, in which our preconceptions about each other and ourselves are dissipated.
Biography
Jennifer Yorke examines the uneasy relationship between consumption, identity, the physical body and the natural world through installations, collages, drawings, prints, photographs and books. Her work is held in over twenty public collections, including those of the Auckland Gallery of Art; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Center for the Book Arts in New York City; the Huntsville Museum of Art; the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, and other institutions. Jennifer has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and been honored with over twenty artist’s residencies. Jennifer earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she attended through a Graduate Trustee Fellowship; and a BA from Carleton College. To date, Yorke’s work has been the subject of nine solo exhibitions, and included in nearly 100 group exhibitions. She lives with her husband Rob and dog Phoebe in Chicago.