MFA Student Madeline Yacovone Takes on Adam and Eve, Gender Dynamics in First Solo Show

Though the boundaries of gender and religion have always been part of Madeline Yacovone's work, it took a while for her to realize it was there.

"The more I did my work, the more it kept coming through," said the MFA in Studio Artstudent. "It happened time and time again. I started working with the symbol of the snake and as I was showing it to people, I kept thinking about what the snake represents in Catholicism without really realizing it. And when other people described what they felt the snake represented I realized that I had been thinking of it from that perspective. So I decided to explore it more."

In "Take, eat." - Yacovone's first solo exhibition, at the Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery in the Melville Library - Yacovone does exactly that.

"I was working a lot with the story of Adam and Eve," she said. "I grew up Catholic, and a lot of that, whether I wanted it to or not, kept coming out in my art."

When Yacovone got to Stony Brook, she started to focus more on that story and the different gender dynamics that were happening.

"Through that process of my work, I got really excited by the symbol of the fig and how it might be able to be used as a feminist symbol," she said. "Visually, it has a lot of great symbolism in it. So I just wanted to focus on that symbol specifically, getting it as big as I could, and seeing what symbols people would be able to see when they came in and looked at it."

Yacovone said that today's political climate pushed her work in a more gender-focused direction.

"I realized that was what was so interesting to me about the story of Adam and Eve was the power dynamics of the gender in it, and how it's still being used today through politics to take rights away from women," she said. "Gender is a really interesting topic at the moment, and it always has been. Now we're looking at the binaries of an origin story that people are still looking back at and adapting to today, and the sort of utopia of what could be. That's why I kept going back to it."

Yacovone always created art growing up, but never thought she would pursue it.

"One of my best friends is one of the most talented artists I know, and I was always taking art classes just to have class with her," she said. "After taking a lot of art classes, I realized I was really interested in graphic design."

Even while she was pursuing a digital media and studio art degree at Marist College, she still didn't consider herself an artist. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

"At that point I realized that I didn't want to look at a computer all the time," she said. "And then I found printmaking, which is a very physical media of art, and I connected with it immediately. As soon as I took my first printmaking class, I realized 'I'm an artist. This is what I'm going to do.' It's not a question anymore. Once you realize you want to make art, you can't not do it."

Yacovone particularly enjoys the artistic diversity of Stony Brook's Department of Artin the College of Arts and Sciences.

"We have a fantastic faculty here," she said. "We have Martin Levine [Toll Professor] with his prints and Lorena Salcedo-Watson [professor of practice] in printmaking, and my work is similar to theirs. And we also have artists like Stephanie Dinkins [Yayoi Kusama Professor of Art], whose work is nothing like mine, but is fantastic in its own right. There's all this knowledge coming from all different directions. Some are more STEM-focused and others are more traditional. But it creates a really interesting environment in our grad program, and it's an environment that will shape me forever."

And when it comes time for Yacovone to put her own art aside, she turns to more art.

"I try to read a lot and I like listening to music," she said. "I try to take in as many art forms as possible. I think it's important for the soul of anyone, not just artists. So I try to consume art rather than media. But to clear my head, I try to find art and focus on it. And it always ends up in my own art later."

- Robert Emproto