What Do You See When You Look Out A Window?
By Justine Hofherr
Jessica Burko never thought about being a doctor, or a lawyer, or a veterinarian, or any of the other countless things children dream about doing when they grow up.
Her decision to be an artist was much simpler than that.
Her mother was an artist. Her father, a writer. Burko liked watching her mom paint. She enjoyed the words her father spilled on the page. Most discussions were about art. She was surrounded by it.
“That’s what everything always was,” she says. Everything in her childhood was somehow connected to art. We’re standing in a fashionable art studio, in front of what is currently her favorite piece that she’s done. It’s called “Down There.” It’s a collage, made up of disjointed images. Four little boys in a black and white photograph peer down. A yellow ruler points up. Cutouts of frilly dresses fit for dolls cut off the head of another image — a woman, arms crossed, wearing a yellow striped dress and a green overcoat. The collage is playful, but also a touch creepy, in the way that “Stepford Wives” is sort of cute, but sinister.
Sure, Burko chose the same career as her mom, but she works in an entirely different medium. Her reasons for making art, however, might just be more aligned with her mom than she thinks.
“My mom,” Burko says, “does large oil paintings. Whenever people ask her how long they take her to make, she says 25 years. Because art is a product of everything that led up to this moment in life.”
background image courtesy of Jessica Burko
I first met Burko on a recent fall evening because I walked to A Street in Fort Point to see some art. I knew of the area — better known as “The Seaport District” — as an up-and-coming Boston neighborhood brimming with young artists, brick warehouses-turned-apartments, and trendy gastropubs with names like “The Blue Dragon.” They don’t serve fries, but offer “sweet potato chips with charred scallion and meat jus dip.”
319 A St. blended in with the other red-brick warehouses on the street, but little handmade paper signs stuck to the windowpanes spelled out “A-R-T.”
I knew I was in the right place.
Burko’s work occupied a little corner of the first floor studio. Pop music thumped. Photographers, sculptors, and jewelers stood beside tables displaying their collections while a few 20-somethings paused politely, backs hunched as they read (or pretended to read) the arts’ description cards, before moving on. Some artists offered cheese and crackers served on little black napkins.
Burko stood off to the side by her paper quilt art, her thick dark curls piled onto her head. She wore a long black wrap skirt that she occasionally ran one hand over, to smooth out the wrinkles. Her other hand was occupied with a half-empty glass of wine. She chatted with two gray-haired women. One wore a colorful patchwork sweater. As she laughed at something Burko said, her earrings — slightly reminiscent of fishbones — jangled against her neck.
Burko didn’t seem to fit into the hip waterfront art community, with its deserted parking lots-turned-multi-million-dollar condominiums. Renovated warehouses, once crumbling, can pass for chic art studios, but that curly-haired mom with glasses askance? She looks like my middle school art teacher.
Burko isn’t normally in this part of town. She was in Seaport because her art was chosen for the “Fort Point Fall Open Studios” event, a three-day affair that allows 150 artists to sell their work directly to customers. Normally, she’s at her home outside Boston with her kids. If I looked at Burko’s art without standing next to Burko the person, I’d imagine the artist as a young moody hipster. But an artist’s work can be strikingly different than the artist herself—or how she presents herself to the world. But as to whatever goes on inside Burko’s mind—the dark corners of her imagination? Well. Let the art speak for itself.
Burko, 40, went to the Rhode Island School of Design for fine art photography. She currently specializes in mixed-media, which means she combines different artistic mediums to make art.
Burko takes photos, then digitizes the images and prints them onto watercolor paper with ink. She then embarks on a treasure hunt of sorts, finding odd vintage photos and snippets of storybook quotes. “It’s like putting together a puzzle,” she says, of rummaging around attics, perusing flea markets, and combing through rubbish at home.
Once Burko has found the appropriate assortment of objects, she combines them using different methods — sometimes she sews, like with her paper quilts that stitch together discarded material with thread; other times, she uses image transfers.
Much of Burko’s work looks young, almost teenage-like. Some collages feel moody, angst-ridden. One of her older collections called “Between Nightmare and Madness” pairs positive and negative films to evoke confusion. “Past and future join seamlessly to eclipse all possibility of an existing present,” Burko writes on her website. One stirring print couples a color photo of a woman lying on a wooden floor with wild hair and outstretched arm. Her face is blurred like she’s in motion. Beneath her are three negative images of a white house that looks long forgotten.
Like her mother, Burko says all of her art is autobiographical.
I’m most drawn to her encaustic collages. “Encaustic” is a combination of raw beeswax, damar resin and pigment that binds her hodgepodge materials together. It’s one of the oldest forms of art media. I learn from Burko that the Greeks used it to ornament ships. Romans used it to paint murals on their homes. Burko says she knows how to tell stories, but she hopes when people look at her art, they see their own stories.
Burko says she doesn’t seek inspiration. She just gets it from life. Being a mom inspires her, telling bedtime stories of cupcakes and elephants. Her husband’s passion for furniture restoration inspires her.
She pauses, adjusts her glasses, and looks out a window whose glass is still from the 19th century, perhaps earlier. It’s rippled and warped with age, and overlooks a new pub, a new gallery, a new condominium complex.
“There are still old doorways around here, old windowpanes. I try to keep an open mind. When I look out that window, I can see…”
Burko trails off.
“How long did it take you to make this?” I ask, pointing to “Down There.”
“25 years.”
She smiles.
