“White Noise,” Kerry Skarbakka’s current exhibit at the North View Gallery at Portland Community College’s Sylvania campus, is about a man who almost was.
Through videos and wall-to-ceiling photographs, Skarbakka uses the canvas of his own white, male body to explore his concern for what he views as the crisis of white masculinity in a deeply divided America.
The 7-foot image of a full-frontal naked man toting a gun in each hand, the bearded man holding a Bible and screaming into a mirror, all are self-portraits of Skarbakka, but they aren’t. He has created an alter-ego, a man he barely escaped becoming, a man who might have turned out very differently if his strict Evangelical upbringing in rural Pulaski, Tenn. – birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan – together with his forced enlistment in the military and the age-old cultural constraints and expectations of the rural South, had forced him into a certain mold.
“White Noise” chronicles the descent of a white male into violent discord, surrounded by guns, trucks spouting black smoke and angry mobs.
“I’ve put in a painstaking amount of work into overcoming my conservative upbringing and religious encoding. However, an alternate narrative could have emerged, another reality, another portrait, that of an angry white man, driven by the tenets of hate, misogyny and bigotry, pushed to the edge,” Skarbakka wrote in his artist’s statement.
There is a sense of relief after viewing the show, but it is the kind of relief you feel after a boil is lanced, or after you vomit from a bout of food poisoning. “Thank God this is being addressed,” you think. “At least someone is talking about this.”
Street Roots recently talked to Skarbakka, who is an assistant professor of photography at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Helen Hill: “White Noise” deals with what you perceive as a national crisis of white male toxicity and how that has reshaped our social political landscape. Can you explain?
Kerry Skarbakka: When you grow up, there are certain ideas about being a man, being a woman. In some areas of the country, the Bible tells you some of these; others are handed down through tradition. When men are losing their jobs to automation, companies are going bankrupt and industries like coal are unsustainable, this ingrained idea of manhood is threatened. Men don’t feel they can continue to provide, but their identity is wrapped up in the role of provider. That’s how they’ve survived. And once that’s taken away, they are left with a desire to get back at whatever they perceive is causing the situation.
When you start looking around at who is pushing the narrative, right now we have a president who is emboldening people to come out of the woodwork with views about things they’ve been holding to their chests for quite a while. We are seeing a backlash to that feeling of loss, and that somehow white men in particular are being replaced by “the other.” They are losing their jobs and way of life in rural communities, but they will blame it on immigrants, liberals or some other conspiracy rather than on the policies of the people driving local and big government. Finding someone to blame with less power and (fewer) rights is always easier when things are in decline.
They see the world changing around them, and in rural communities, things happen at a much slower pace. Transgender bathrooms in Target, or equal rights for LGBTQ – these things are happening so fast, and the natural, ingrained reaction is “Wait, whoa, not in my America, not in my community! Where is God in all this, how will we fight this off?” And we have a president who continues to degrade and demean and blame everyone but himself, so you have people who mimic that and say it’s someone else’s fault, it’s OK to demonize the culprit, the one that doesn’t look like them.
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Hill: What is the difference between toxic masculinity and the traditional provider, the warrior, the protective mythopoetic male figure that is strong and good? They are both masculinity models. What makes one toxic?
Skarbakka: I think where it becomes toxic is how it begins to be passed down, and as a father of a 4-year-old son, this is where my concerns come in – how you treat and refer to other people and to the world around, how you pass that on to the next generation. Where you’re promoting ideas of overt sexism and misogyny and aiding in the disruption of equality and continuity and balance, that’s where toxicity comes in. I don’t think any of us are perfect. We are prone to being bad messengers; we all come from where we come from; we harbor what we harbor; we are flawed and prone to failure. But some are better at putting themselves in check than others.
I’ve bred my own form of toxicity. The difference is that people who are self-reflexive and introspective see the things they do and feel bad. They try to do better next time. There is a sense of remorse.
Hill: What is your responsibility surrounding the depiction of the essence of a community that you are familiar with but are not really part of?
Skarbakka: The critique is there. However, I am also presenting a space of consideration, a potential for empathy. My stepfather forced me into the military because he felt it was my duty to give back to my country, through service. There was a certain masculinity in that; go into the military, man up, prove yourself. He told me that even if in the long run it doesn’t work out, you can honestly critique your country because you worked for it; you will have a leg to stand on.
I grew up in this environment. I lived and experienced it firsthand. Whether or not that gives me any more right than the next guy to call shit on something, I don’t know. But that has some glue in my brain.
Hill: In your large photos of angry crowds, we see everyone gathered together, drinking, egging each other on, women as well. Can you talk about these photos?
Skarbakka: The crowd mentality for the show was necessary. I included women in the photos. The show started off about angry white men, but you can’t have a conversation without including the women who facilitate, who take part, who go along willingly or unwillingly, but they go along regardless and vote against their own best interests. I can add my mother in there if I want to; maybe you can add your mother. I’m trying to be fair with the conversation.
The mob mentality is difficult to depict, but it’s important. Its difficult when you are from a rural area and everyone looks the same and you are expected to act the same. I went back recently to visit my dad in Arkansas, and we were with one of my dad’s workers, and he threw out the “n” word, just laid it out on me as if I was just one of the guys, and I thought what do I do? Do I have a conversation with him right now, or do I let it slide because it’s not the right place and time?
As white men, our privilege allows us to step in and out of these conversations and allows us to delicately dance around certain situations that would potentially put us in harm’s way. That’s the embarrassment that also comes with my own situation. I wish I was stronger, bigger, better. I find it uneasy to get in someone’s face and say, “You can’t say that.” You check your safety so much these days; who knows who has guns, who’s really crazy? I admit I look for the least caustic way to defuse tensions.
Hill: There are a lot of cars in your exhibit. You walk beneath the enormous underbelly of a Dodge Challenger as you enter the exhibit, and toward the back there is a large photograph of a rolling coal truck, (a modified diesel engine truck that emits black clouds of smoke). What is the significance of these cars and trucks?
Skarbakka: There is a car motif that runs through the entire show and inherent symbolism with each depiction. The 2010 Dodge Challenger is the same sports car James Fields used to run down protesters and kill Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. The rolling coal truck is an example of a “fuck you” masculine toxicity that runs through certain cultures. It is also an anti-environmentalist statement often referred to as “Prius Repellent.” They will pull up next to a Prius in an intersection, or a bicyclist, and billow a big old black lung of smoke onto the car or bicycle as they take off. It’s a provocation of the left.
Hill: There is one safe space in the middle, one place where there are no images of gun barrels pointed directly at us; we can rest from the 7-foot-tall angry man with his guns and penis at eye level. This one panel in the middle includes tender pictures of your upbringing, you playing with dogs, with your mom and brother.
Skarbakka: The tender space you found, I think having me in there humanizes it. The original idea of this show was to see if there was a conversation that could be had as the division in this country was becoming profound. I really wanted to see if I could have been one of these people that we are discussing. But I’m not, and inside that person was some young kid like myself who did have a tender upbringing, lower middle class, with the Bible and a community that surrounds itself with a certain ideology. That type of environment is hard for any kid to get out of. By placing this bit of humanity in there, I wanted there to be the potential for redemption, instead of looking at somebody as deplorable, unfixable and deciding you could no longer have them over for Thanksgiving.
Hill: I kept looking for a father image. I suppose I associate angry white men with unresolved issues surrounding the father. What role has your father played in your life? Has he seen your show? If so, what does he think of it?
Skarbakka: My dad is the guy in the boat. This image of him is representative of his role in my life; hands off and nonexistent for the most part, his back is to me. When my mother died of cancer, he came back into the picture. He is proud of me for being a professor, but there is not a lot of straight communication. We can talk about fishing. He knows that I took pictures of him, he knows I did work in his massive shed in Arkansas, but he doesn’t ask me about it.
Hill: Why did you not turn out to be that angry man you depict in your show?
Skarbakka: There are a couple of answers. The hard answer is I actually really don’t know. The other answer I have is that art gave me a sense of curiosity and differentiated me from everyone in high school. Art gave me my own identity. I wasn’t a jock; I was the artist. I wasn’t completely isolated or ostracized, because I could draw. But I did things differently – I wore makeup – but my authoritarian stepfather wouldn’t let me get away with much.
Hill: You write in your artist’s statement that the birth of your son inspired a lot of this. How are you going to raise him as a male in this culture? And how do you think he will rebel?
Skarbakka: I know why I rebelled, and I’m trying to do things differently so I can try to figure out how to head off his rebellion. My fear is that he will fall into a group and go online and start finding places he shouldn’t be visiting and gather his information in a way that will promote some ugly challenges. He is a real sweetie now; you can’t imagine him being anything else, but he has as much potential as anyone.
But the fact is I’m worried about him. My wife and I both look at what’s coming from us into him; what’s coursing through his veins is a big question. I look at the show as a way to have a conversation with him later on. He wonders why he’s in it, why the big photos of him are in it. I don’t really have an answer for him, because he’s 4.
Hill: What do you think the next few years are going to hold for us as a country, where will all the frustration of the angry white men take us?
Skarbakka: I am never the optimist. When you grow up expecting the rapture to happen at any moment, or the apocalypse, you already have an association with things coming to an end in a violent way.
I knew Trump was going to win for all the reasons he won. I took all the back roads from Wyoming to Arkansas to see my dad in July before the 2016 election, and I was looking around, listening to the radio and thought, you know, this fucker’s going to win. I knew because all these people I had grown up with had been waiting for someone to tell them all the things they’ve been wanting to hear, someone to support their beliefs and feed their fears, and he’s that guy. I have never seen much political activity from those parts. I started seeing all the Confederate flags, yard signs with people clinging to their guns and their Bibles, and increasing pockets of violence sprouting everywhere, and I said this is it; something just turned. And I got scared.
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For me to think anything less than the bloodshed that’s already happening or the continuation of a civil war that never really ended is unrealistic, unless of course people start to talk and figure out that all of this has been a big performance by the people pulling the strings. No one knows who to trust anymore. I just don’t believe we, or they, are going to find the answers we need soon enough, unless we start talking.
Hill: So that’s why you did the show; you wanted people to talk.
Skarbakka: Exactly. I want people to walk in there and wonder, is this guy a white supremacist, is he alt right or alt left? Where is he? I didn’t want to give away too much.
The show for me is uncomfortable as a white male. It is an expression of what I feel society feels like right now, aspects of things I am concerned about. It is lumped together in one space, and I think it reflects the tension a lot of people are feeling right now. The show is meant to give you a tense, claustrophobic feeling; the noise of the images, the drone coming from the videos, the imagery presents a noisy space, images of angry people screaming at you as you walk in.
The work rides a very fine line. The show was intended to create a conversation.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “White Noise,” an exhibition by Kerry Skarbakka.
WHERE: North View Gallery, Portland Community College Sylvania, 12000 SW 49th Ave., Portland.
WHEN: Through Dec. 20. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.See more about White Noise on Skarbakka's website.