| Jesse Burke, who received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, confronts the ways in which we establish modes of gender identification and how these seemingly direct processes can be blurred. Reaching beyond the socially constructed idea of gender, Burke is interested in sexual relativity and a regression towards sexual confusion. In the same ways that Freud placed the idea of reconciliation at the foundation of sexual development, Burke does not perceive sexuality as a biological division. |
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Jesse Burke, who received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, confronts the ways in which we establish modes of gender identification and how these seemingly direct processes can be blurred. Reaching beyond the socially constructed idea of gender, Burke is interested in sexual relativity and a regression towards sexual confusion. In the same ways that Freud placed the idea of reconciliation at the foundation of sexual development, Burke does not perceive sexuality as a biological division.
“My belief is that we are composed of both masculine and feminine traits,” he said recently in an interview. “I have made it my goal to tease out the attributes typically perceived as feminine in my male subjects, and vice versa. It is this complicated balance of soft and hard that I feel makes us who we are. Too much of one throws off the equilibrium. Ultimately, I am looking for a rupturing point within traditional masculine identity, because I have always felt that it existed in my personal identity.
Burke’s photographs focus on that tip-of-the-iceberg moment when sexuality is no longer polarized, but reconciled. His series “Nectar Impérial,” for instance, documents pairs of men photographed immediately after shotgunning a beer—perhaps one of the most notoriously masculine actions. The men, as is to be expected, appear vulnerable—a vulnerability that is delicate and complicated. In a photograph entitled Timberland, a lumberjack sits on an elevated log. Shot only from the waist down, his male subject spreads his legs in a V-formation atop the horizontally tree. The result is a materialization of sexual confusion within which the lower body of a male jarringly resembles a female’s sexual anatomy being penetrated. The young, shirtless subject of Burke’s The Birth of Adonis stares into the lens, challenging and questioning both. A gentle halo of sunlight caresses his unkempt hair; his torso like a Rubens child—fleshy and undifferentiated.
Burke’s work can be disturbing in its ability to unhinge sexual constraints and expose new, plastic identities—if one sees his subjects’ genders re-envisioned and restructured, what is the implication for own?
