'Offending History' uncovers gender bias

By MARA McGINNIS
News Services Editor

Ill-famed ice-skater Tonya Harding, maniacal mistress Amy Fisher and murderous mother Susan Smith aren't exactly the female icons that come to mind when we think of "women in history."

However, artist Judith Yourman recognizes the historical merit of such "female offenders" in "Offending History," a multimedia exhibit opening in the UB Art Gallery that cleverly uncovers outdated, gender-biased values embedded in the media portrayal of female criminals.

Figure skater Tonya Harding is one of the "female offenders" featured in Judith Youman's "Offending History" exhibit.

The exhibit, which runs until May 16, will open tomorrow with a reception from 7-9 p.m. in the gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

"Offending History," a paradoxical but engaging contribution to Women's History Month at UB, will explore the media "misrepresentation" of such villainous women who have-in the eyes of society-allegedly betrayed womankind by violating unwritten cultural rules with their "unfeminine" conduct.

The exhibit evolved from Yourman's popular "Female Offender" series and her critically acclaimed "Nightmare at the Helmsley Palace," an exhibit in which she considered the media spectacle of Leona Helmsley's tax-evasion trial.

Her work, which has been exhibited nationally and internationally, argues that an established, but often subconscious, puritanical morality continues to influence how women, particularly "female offenders," are portrayed in the media.

Images from television news coverage and trial testimony are captured in computer inkjet prints, video installations and artist books with superimposed text from several 19th- and 20th-century sources of documentation, including Victorian morals manuals, etiquette books, codes of behavior from old Girl Scout handbooks and criminology texts.

"The exhibit frames what happens as these women pass from headlines into history," explains Lisa Fischman, gallery associate curator. "Our culture is fascinated with women who break these social laws.

"The title of the exhibition questions how female offenders fit into, challenge and perhaps change society's conception of 'history as a grand narrative of progress,'" Fischman adds.

Yourman carefully has chosen moralizing text to demonstrate how traditional values subconsciously affect the public's opinion of women criminals and how the media help to manipulate and magnify that opinion through their use of dramatic imagery.

According to Fischman, Yourman chooses text that challenges and clarifies the unspoken judgment embedded in distorted media representations of female offenders.

A banner installation features a print series of figure-skater Harding on the ice contradicted by such phrases as "Do a good turn daily" and "Display modesty in attire."

Another of Yourman's striking pieces shows Susan Smith burying her face in her hands at her trial, accompanied by the caption: "The maternal instinct dominates everything else, for from the cradle onward, woman is mother, mad with motherhood."