Dena Yago at Bodega

Dena Yago’s exhibition “The Lusting Breed” consists of five tableaus, each taking on a role that has been ascribed to women in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.  These include renditions of Courbet’s Sleeping Spinner and Grain Sifters, as well as images of women as caretakers, designers, listeners, and craftsmen.  The work speaks to the sense that the roles of women throughout history has been and continues to be fetishized and to a point trivialized, yet at the same time the images carved into the tableaus are specific to the exact time they belong to.  Sleeping Spinner is a product of 1853 showing a take on the working woman at the time, and The Influencer is an example of the view on the working woman of 2017.  While representing a long-held struggle, they are separated by their context.