Double Dare Ya: Burns, Kurland, & Ross-Ho

North Galleries

February 04, 2022 — June 26, 2022

Viewpoints is a rotating series that highlights artwork from the Henry's collection, paired with commentary and insights from members of the University of Washington community.

This iteration of Viewpoints presents paintings by Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago, IL) with photographs by Marsha Burns (b. 1945, Seattle, WA) and Justine Kurland (b. 1969, Warsaw, NY) that explore self-expression and identity formation during adolescence. Double Dare Ya, the exhibition’s title, refers to the 1992 Bikini Kill song of the same name in which Kathleen Hanna addresses girls in her audience directly, “Dare ya to do what you want, dare ya to be who you will, dare ya to cry right out loud.”

The community contributors for this iteration of Viewpoints are Kari Lerum, Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Bothell; Debi Talukdar, PhD candidate from the College of Education at UW Seattle; and Ilah Walker, an undergraduate student at the UW Seattle campus and former Henry Teen Art Collective member.

Community Contributions

Counter-cultured Girlhoods
Kari Lerum
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington, Bothell

Collectively the artworks made by Marsha Burns, Justine Kurland, and Amanda Ross-Ho offer intertemporal and imaginative stories about gender, identity, and power. Burns’s black and white portraits of young Roman rebels in the late 1980s exhibit earnest defiance, hope, despair, familiar counter-cultural expressions found in Europe and North America in the Reagan-Gorbachev age. They also reference the era’s ‘80s gender-alternative musicians. (Sinead O’Connor’s shaved head; Boy George’s thin pointed eyebrows; Siouxsie Sioux’s spiky black hair). Kurland’s color saturated Flashlight, 1999, features two young female-bodied subjects—one butch and one femme—walking hand in hand through a darkened forest. A flashlight held by the butch girl forges their future queer path but at first glance it also feels like car headlights from the gender police. Like many young lesbian relationships in the US in the late 1990s, the image is explorative, romantic, exciting and just a wee bit scary. (Kurland’s Flashlight also conjures the iconic lesbian coming of age film, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, 1995.) While Burns’s and Kurland’s photographs enunciate their work with (sur)realism, Ross-Ho’s Untitled (SIMPLE PLAN) and Untitled (MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE) from 2013 are hyper-focused to the point of blur. The mysterious source subject for both–a hand-adorned backpack found hanging on the side of a dumpster in Chicago–begs several questions: Who is its owner? Is the backpack abandoned, lost, or stolen? What are the meanings of its hieroglyphics? Such questions about identity, agency, and meaning are intrinsic to the evolving cultural project of girlhood.

Being Yourself is a Revolutionary Act
Debi Talukdar
PhD candidate in Education, University of Washington, Seattle

Who do you want to be? What would you gain? What would you lose?

When I first viewed the Double Dare Ya exhibit I was reminded of a quote by poet Nayyirah Waheed. “What about this theory—the fear of not being enough and the fear of being ‘too much’ are exactly the same fear—the fear of being you.” As an immigrant and a woman of color in the US, these images bring up the same simultaneous and contradictory fear within me. I try to make peace with it but not being myself has never felt peaceful.

The facial expressions, body language, outfits, and locations in these portraits raise questions about identity and authenticity. The subjects in each artist’s work—most visibly the young women in Marsha Burns’s pictures but just as powerfully the absent owner of Amanda Ross-Ho’s reconstructed backpack—are unapologetically themselves. They make their presence felt. They take up space. At the same time I am reminded that being yourself is too costly for too many in an unjust world.

Embodying identities that express who you want to be is a difficult and vulnerable practice. In a neocolonial and patriarchal world, it is a quiet transgression capable of upending systems of power and oppression, a radical act of love for yourself and those who come after you. As I continue to absorb the courage of the young women featured in Kurland’s and Burns’s work, my initial thoughts give way to admiration and, more importantly, hope.

The Journey of New Growth
Ilah Walker
Undergraduate Student, University of Washington, Seattle

The time spent between girlhood and womanhood is, above all, contradictory. Loneliness and community are two sides of the same coin. How you’re seen and how you see yourself are always in flux. Everything teenage girls are and everything they aren’t is subject to scrutiny and persecution.

There is a thread of this journey and the transitory nature of finding oneself as a woman in this collection of works. Sometimes it manifests as a hardened, industrial portrait that finds solace within the protective folds of a leather coat, fighting off the image that’s been made for you, or in taking a Stephen King-esque pilgrimage through the darkened woods with only your companion and your intuition as guides. There is new growth poking through the underbrush, a new phase of the forest on the way. It’s seen in a spare notebook page, scribbled on and tossed into a backpack, shifted just out of comprehension. Instead of being crumpled up and tossed, this amalgamation of offhand marks on paper has been elevated onto painted canvas. The musings of a teenage girl are not often celebrated, least of all by herself. There is not usually much space made for young women’s mistakes and private musings.

I don’t know these women and girls. I don’t know their last names or what their voices sound like. But, I feel kinship with them anyways. Growing up as a teenage girl makes you feel like nobody and anybody all at once.