Commentary about Janica’s Photographs:

Constance White, Associate Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“I have come to think of Janica as a seeker - looking for truths in life and thus her work. Something we do as humans is try to make sense of the place in which we find ourselves; we pose questions and look for answers. Janica puts the inquiry right before our eyes, showing to us, in most cases, the same objects we see all around us except that they have been transformed by her lyrical way of seeing. Her work frames and makes visible the elemental material of our sensuous imaginations and primal emotions. From one view, her combined-image pieces seem to propose deep connections or continuity amount things in the world that appear on their surface discontinuous and unrelated and, from another, they seem like free-associating components of allegories of the mind and senses. The color can be at once luscious, chilling; the rendering of space can be voluptuous and stark……At the core of Janica’s unwavering dedication to working is an absolute need to be doing the work no matter what. Her tenacity, passion, and creative imagination promise to bring us more of this beautiful and profound inquiry”.
Jay Jensen, Chief Curator, formerly of the Contemporary Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii and currently Curator of The Honolulu Museum, Hawaii
“......In her work, Yoder makes a highly personal poetic journey which begins with the camera as recorder of objective reality but shifts towards the subjective as she delves into the elusive realm of her own psyche. Whiles the images she uses function as symbols, deeply connected to her and drawn from her environment and life, their significance or meaning for her is often unconscious. Yoder says she doesn’t like to analyze her images lest the tension of the work be diminished, and she acknowledges that the works will have their own meaning for viewers.Yoder focuses attention on the extraordinary richness of the everyday world and at the same time transcends her subjects by creating a timeless space in which the visual and the ethereal, the physical and the spiritual are united and revealed.”

Jane Livingston: From the Corcoran Gallery Catalog from Yoder’s

one person exhibit, written by Chief Curator Jane Livingston

“….Clearly a major transformation has taken place from the lucid,

boldly placed imagery of Black Hands with Doll, to the Chicken

Series—-and not only in our own perception. It is a change which

reflects the artist’s own maturation, an acceptance of the

transience and the provisional quality of visual (and emotional)

experience. If anything, the photographs of the chickens, with

all their radically uncontrolled sense of composition,

their oddly combined wildness and clumsiness and power

—-are exactly what one wants them to be…Yoder’s several

unusually diverse kinds of work are united by a temperamental

curiosity about what the camera will

do with any subject………..”