Pressures on women never come from just one place. This is what makes them nearly impossible to resist, why it feels like we always lose. It’s why the things men say to women can affect them in ways that are difficult to explain. The words and behaviour of individual men can channel whole networks of power that exert a disproportionate force invisible to those who are not his target.

4 Years in 40 Postcards explores the experience of gender-based emotional manipulation by pairing notes from the artist’s colleague with painted images of women from fashion magazines. The images on the postcards depict the idealized visions of female beauty and power against which women measure themselves, and, at first, the beautiful forms and colours appear inviting, and the postcards suggest a nostalgic sense of connection. But there is something uncanny about the way the women hang in space, and the viewer quickly finds herself surrounded by demands and expectations, evoking the feelings of powerlessness, exhaustion, and guilt that such seemingly innocuous messages evoke for women when experienced in aggregate and against the background of particular ideals. That which appears innocuous in isolation relies on powerful gender norms to function as an invisible goad that urges a woman back into line. By using personal messages and cultural imagery to dictate the viewer’s movement through space, the installation replicates the complex emotional web that constrains women’s movements, both physically and symbolically.

The number of postcards is a reference to 40-day periods of penance in the Christian tradition. In copying the messages and images by hand, the artist has engaged in a kind of penance, attempting, by her labour, to gain power over that which holds her captive while also exposing her own complicity in that captivity. The women from the magazines advance patriarchal and capitalist agendas and, in the process, they influence and constrain the movements of other women but, while they appear powerful, they are themselves vulnerable and fragile, used and discarded, literally “hanging by a thread.” In this, the work underscores the limited and conditional power given to women, the complex interplay of victimhood and responsibility that being a woman under patriarchy entails, and the labour it takes to resist harmful cultural agendas.  

The artist invites other women to participate in this labour as well by writing down a coercive message they have received and taping it to the wall.