ARTIST 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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jennifer Yorke examines the uneasy relationship between consumption, identity, the physical body and the natural world through installations, collages, drawings, prints, photographs and books. Jennifer’s work is held in over a dozen public collections, including those of the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University-Long Beach; the Auckland Gallery of Art; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the Huntsville Museum of Art. Her work is included in several recent publications, including STUDIO VISIT Volume 53 (2025), juried by Sarah Montross, Senior Curator, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; Aron Fine’s COLOR THEORY: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION; and William Fick and Elizabeth Grabowski’s PRINTMAKING. Yorke has been an artist-in-residence at Anchor Graphics; the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts; the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences; the International Musuem of Surgical Science; the Jentel Artists Residency; Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art & the Environment; the Millay Colony; La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts, Noyers France; the Ragdale Foundation; the Ucross Foundation; the University of the West of England Centre for Fine Print Research; the Vermont Studio Center, and other institutions, and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Jennifer graduated from Carleton College cum laude and with Distinction (honors), and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she attended through a Graduate Trustee Fellowship. She lives and works in Chicago with her husband Rob and dog Phoebe.
© Jennifer Yorke