Kianni Johnson
Women and Media
May 5, 2017
Victoria Van Dyke is a
lesbian feminist artist from Toronto Canada. She was born in 1976 and her
tragic childhood plays a huge part in who she is as an artist. She is known for
her controversial work and utilizes mostly photography and collage. Her work focuses
on ideas of cannibalism, snakes, guns, religion, sexuality and censorship. Her
current goal with her art is to poke fun at society and their obsession with
sex, and the patriarchal treatment of young underage women as sex objects. Van
Dyke admits to a strong thirst to eat the flesh of humans, but objects to the
immorality of killing.
However, her original purpose for her art and poetry was
to be a source of therapy for herself. It wasn't until she realized that many
other women have been sexually abused that she decided to use her work as
inspiration for others. This speaks to The Transformation of Silence into
Language and Action by Audre Lorde. As Lorde says, “My silences have not
protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word
spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am
still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the worlds
to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” (Lorde, 41)
There are many things that can be hard to share but most of the time there is
someone else going through something similar who can relate and will
appreciated your voice for speaking up. Lorde also says, “And where the words
of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our
responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine
them in their pertinence to our lives. We not hide behind the mockeries of
separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”
(Lorde, 43) Both Lorde and Van Dyke spoke out against things that had affected
them using their art in their own ways. Both women demonstrate the baring of
their very brave souls by sharing those pieces of them with the world.
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| "Stop idealizing me!" |
At the very young age
of 11, she was sexually abused and raped. Her trust was destroyed because it
was two men which she considered to be her family, which were her foster father
and foster brother. However, she remained quiet and didn’t come forward about
it until she was 18 which was too late. Neither of the two men never received
any jail time and they basically got away with what they did. The overwhelming
burden of her traumatic memories plays a part in her creation of what some
people may consider to be very disturbing art, as well as the idea of
cannibalism. She often uses cannibalism as a metaphor for evil within modern
society, businessmen eating each other and eating the poor in order to make
themselves fat/rich.
It was her frustration
and depression that drove her to think thoughts that were considered to be
“unnatural”. Therefore, Van Dyke voluntarily placed herself into a mental
asylum, where she spent three years. Ironic how although she was the victim of
rape, she is also the one who ended up behind bars. She was released in the
spring of 2005 but she continued to be in and out of several mental asylum’s
due to her relapse of depression and attempts to commit suicide. In 2005 she
tried to jump in front of a subway train, fortunately people managed to pull
her from the tracks before the train got to her. In the summer of 2005, she
wrote this poem entitled “More pain please”,
“People say suicide is silly
But what do they know?
They don’t look back at a lifetime of pain,
And look forward to a lifetime of more.” (Van Dyke)
She is currently living in Toronto, Canada. Her most
recent work was in 2007 when she chopped off her little toe and put it in a
jar, which she offered to a gallery as a work of art. The gallery refused to
accept it and called the police.
Works Cited
Dyke Van, Victoria. “more pain please.” Victoria Van
Dyke’s Poetry: Summer 2005, http://www.lilithgallery.com/gallery/vandyke/vandykepoetry1.html
Lorde, Audre. "The transformation of silence into
language and action." Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (1977):
81-84.
The Auto-Biography of Victoria Van Dyke. N.p., n.d.
Web. 05 May 2017.
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