Welcome to no. 34 in our series Poignant Pics where our editor, Diana Nicholette Jeon, writes about Jessica Burko’s photographic installation work entitled “Quiet/Loud.”

It’s my life (and maybe yours, too…)

I'm continually intrigued by work about the experience of contemporary American womanhood. The competing expectations of women today are both externally and internally manufactured. And despite changes in societal norms since the 1950s, it is as challenging, nay, impossible as it ever was to do it all. Something always feels undone. Something always feels as if we are lacking. Someone always feels ignored, as often as not that someone may be our inner selves. But to churn the old cliches, time marches on and will not wait for us, so there are multiple choices made about what is important enough to spend it on. Then there is the knowledge that the choice we made may or may not meet the needs of a spouse, our family, and often, even worse, ourselves. I'm not saying this is only something women experience; I surmise that men probably have their version of this experience. But for me, as a woman, it is the dilemma I relate to and the one within which I have spent my adult life.

Jessica Burko's photographic installation work, Quiet/Loud (2018), hits right to the heart of the issues involved. We are placed into the center of the contradiction and made to feel the pulls that lay within being a mother and having an individual career. Using processes of repetition and motion, she conveys what she experiences in her daily life. She writes, "Maintaining a sense of self while navigating expected roles of modern womanhood feels like flying and drowning, like I am perpetually in a state of elation, deep exhaustion, and tense bewilderment all rolled into one. Quiet/Loud addresses themes of personal identity, balancing mother, artist, and individual, while endeavoring to emerge whole from the complicated soup of being human. Visualizing the contradiction between asserting an identity as an individual and being lost in the onslaught of parenthood is portrayed by being silenced and blinded, and of teetering on a precipice populated by broken, disembodied toys."

Using writing, image transfer, and encaustic processes, Jessica's technical work's repetitiveness brings to mind one of my favorite artists, perhaps my most favorite artist, Ann Hamilton. While different in character, Hamilton's installations are known for their use of process and repetition. Writing for the Guggenheim, J. Fiona Ragheb states that "Hamilton's work foregrounds sensory experience and evokes memories that are rooted in the body, operating in a seemingly prelinguistic or entirely nonverbal realm." Much of daily life (in both parenting and art-making) is rooted in that same realm. Burying the self-portraits under layers of encaustic (a technique rooted in repetitive processes) distances us, the viewer, from her experience, hence from her. It also somewhat removes Jessica (as seen in self-portraits) from the din of everyday life. Surrounding the work with unvarying, partially-told children's rhymes references the insistent presence of the amount of time and effort being a parent means.

Quiet/Loud is an insightful, thoughtful, and carefully strategized work. Its ambiguity allows us to guess at the specifics of Jessica's life. Yet the specificity of her artistic choices leaves those who have tried to be a wife and/or a mother at the same time they hold a demanding career wildly nodding in acknowledgment (and secretly thankful that we are not alone in the overwhelm of these life choices.)

Jessica has made a brilliant and telling installation that genuinely succeeds at being visually compelling as well as accurate. I truly and utterly wish I made this work myself. Bravo, Jessica.

* For Ragheb’s full article, see https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1607

Artist Bio

Jessica Burko has been an exhibiting artist since 1985. She holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Imaging Arts and Science from Rochester Institute of Technology. Burko has shown in exhibitions throughout the United States including recently in New England with a 2018 solo show at ArtProv Gallery, Providence, RI, and her work was included in Exposure 2019 at the Photographic Resource Center, Cambridge, MA, and she had a 2020 solo exhibition at the Shelter In Place Gallery, Boston, MA. Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Art New England, and Artscope Magazine. Jessica Burko's studio is in the Wareham Studio Building in Boston's South End where she has been producing her photography-based mixed media work since 2006. 

Jessica Burko’s portfolio can be viewed here.

Author Bio

Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI. She works primarily with lens-based media, often in combination with other media or techniques. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.