Paws and reflect

Scratch the surface of visual artist and Meow Meow and the Meow Meows member Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough.

By Sarah Han

I FIRST MET Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough at a party in the Mission District about two years ago. She was friendly, funny, and down-to-earth, a pleasant surprise among the sea of too-cool-for-school hipsters who made up the shoulder-to-shoulder gathering. We were introduced because I was in a band-that-was-never-to-be called Mao Mao Mao and she was just starting a project called Meow Meow and the Meow Meows. We joked about putting out a split 7-inch, even though I knew my project would never be realized.

It wasn't long before I started hearing the San Francisco artist-musician's name more often, not just from mutual friends, but also in snippets of strangers' conversations, and in press releases for art shows around the city. This April, when I heard someone ask "Hey, are you going to go see Meow Meow and the Meow Meows at the Hemlock?" I thought to myself, "Oh shit, she really did it."

I was blown away at that Hemlock show. First of all, there were a million people there, and although most of them were there to see California Lightning, I heard more than a few saying they were at the show just to see openers Meow Meow. By the time the band started into their 15-minute set, the area around the stage was as packed as if they were the headliner. Second, they were amazing. Don't let the cutesy name throw you; Yarbrough (a self-taught bassist with classical piano background) and Larry Boothroyd (bassist with Victims Family and Meow Meow drummer) create music that is powerful, loud, and rough around the edges, yet soulful and catchy. Yarbrough's singing recalls the impassioned wailings of PJ Harvey, and sometimes the yowlings of a cat. The duo touch on punk and post-prog tempos and stylings but come off more melodic and bluesy.

Later I saw Meow Meow again, performing at Thee Parkside in August, the same day of Yarbrough's art opening at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, and the same day I realized she was involved in several really important and interesting projects that most people, like me, will only imagine doing in their lifetimes.

Burning up

It's been a busy year for Yarbrough. Meow Meow is just an extension of various other creative undertakings: the 29-year-old artist, who took ceramics in high school and studied metalwork at California College of Arts and Crafts, started making music because she wasn't sure if she'd have the monetary means and space to continue creating visual art after she finished school. Not that Yarbrough was hoping to make a load of money off her music (which she calls "pretty unfashionable") – making music was a good creative option just in case she didn't have a studio space or ran out of cash to buy art materials. "You don't need equipment to make [music] if you make it in your head.... You don't have to wear a respirator, steel-toes, and make sure you don't get burned," she said.

Currently, she's helping her boyfriend, artist Jarrett Mitchell, construct his latest work for New York's celebrated Deitch Projects and putting the finishing touches on her 2-D sculptural duct tape pieces for GenArt's "Blu: Emerge 2003" show. Yarbrough's collaborative series with Mitchell, "South of Seventh Heaven" (referencing everyone's favorite Christian family on the WB, as well as the Slayer song) appears in the exhibit "Revealing Influences: Conversations with Bay Area Artists" at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, and her installation The most persuasive voice is the voice you hear in your head is showing at Spanganga in the Mission. The latter is tall and imposing, constructed out of pieces of scrap wood, a large, decaying found tree trunk, three bronze spokes, and a motor. The structure looks like a telephone pole that's been split and fitted with two doors. The bronze prongs poke out of the "pole," and the viewer is invited to sheath the metal with a plastic drinking straw, bite down on it, and cover his or her ears. The viewer will then hear the faint buzz of music by American Indian rap band the Hostile Takeover. On the front and back doors of the piece, Yarbrough quotes from Ram Dass's Be Here Now: "The most persuasive voice you hear is the voice you hear in your head" and " ... you're sending out vibrations that are affecting everything around you."

These words haunted me. And when I met up with Yarbrough, I realized that they haunted her, too. A voice in her head – her "value system," as she calls it – propels her to constantly challenge herself by creating works that interact with the community around her, encouraging her to be practical and methodical, a problem-solver always looking to build, rebuild, and rebuild again.

Social function

At CCAC, Yarbrough made discarded metal into functional furniture. It's fitting, then, that she works at the Exploratorium as an exhibit builder. There, surrounded by the cold, hard facts of science, Yarbrough creates works that guide viewers as they learn and help them have fun doing it. It's an artistic challenge to frame factual truths and observations in visually interesting ways, and she's fascinated with the outcome of her work, how people interact with her exhibit designs. "Some people are super engaged. Some people are engaged because other people are engaged. Some people move on to something else," she said. "It's all OK. It's all just part of it."

While she claims her art is not overtly political, the "South of Seventh Heaven" pieces reference societal flaws and pop culture absurdities, including the way the government and media handled the situation in Waco and the nation's war on terrorism. Yarbrough's contributions are assembled from elaborate and skillfully cut layers of duct tape and contact paper, temporary materials that downplay the historical nature of her references and reference the short-attention span of mass media.

Her most politically charged work to date is an ongoing project she started in January, originally as a proposal for an exhibit at the Lab called "Inside of Insides." Wanting to help create something that had nothing to do with her own life, Yarbrough has been working with eight female inmates in a maximum-security prison in Chowchilla. The time-based piece allows the women to tell their side of the story to people on the other side of the bars by making art framed within a 16-foot-by-16-foot space (the dimensions of a prison cell that houses eight women).

Yarbrough visits the prison every other weekend and acts as a mentor, but mostly as a friend, to the women. She marvels at the atrocious lack of humanity and compassion that society, the government, and the prison system have for them. "[The inmates are] put into prison, and the key's thrown away. They're completely dehumanized.... They're mothers; they're individuals who look just like you and me," she said, explaining her reasons for embarking on the project. "All you have to do is take one misstep and you can be in prison. There's a fine line between here and there."

That fine line is what Yarbrough hopes to bring to light; she wants the audience to notice the differences, as well as the similarities, between the viewers and those individuals society deems discardable. She doesn't want the audience to look at the "quaint" prison art and then go home and forget it, and she hopes this project will encourage correspondence between people inside and outside prison.

The Lab was unable to accommodate the necessary amount of space for the exhibit but will be showing a scaled-down version in January, which will feature drawings, ceramics, and paintings and a video of skits, songs, and other performative works by the women. Yarbrough has yet to find a space to host the full-scale project, but if and when she does, she says her visits to the prison won't stop until she feels her work is done – an end that's nowhere in sight.

Side by side with Yarbrough's austere work ethic and value system is her sense of humor. Throughout the interview, Yarbrough and I couldn't stop laughing, at anything and everything. When I ask her about what she thinks of the California College of the Arts' new name, for example, she suggests that the California Culinary Academy sue the art school for usurping its acronym.

But it's obvious Yarbrough's got her head screwed on tight and that her humor isn't facetious. She's got a message. Yarbrough may be reluctant to call her art political because political assumes loftiness, and loftiness translates as privilege. She's not looking to give a voice to those who can already be heard, or to even define herself or others based on art. "It's not important to give it all away. It's important that people ask questions and draw their own conclusions," she said. "As soon as you make something that you can fit into a box, you're dead."

'Revealing Influences: Conversations with Bay Area Artists' runs through Nov. 15. Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Tues.-Fri. and Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (first Wed., 11 a.m.-7 p.m.). $4, $3 seniors, free for members and those 18 and under (free first Wed. and Sat., 10 a.m.-noon), Museum of Craft and Folk Art, Fort Mason Center, Bldg. A, Marina at Laguna, S.F. (415) 775-0991. 'The most persuasive voice is the voice you hear in your head' is on display through Nov. 16, Spanganga, 3376 19th St., S.F. Call for hours. (415) 821-1102. 'Blu: Emerge 2003' opens Thurs/24. Runs through Nov. 8, Big House, 1417 15th St., S.F. Call for hours. (415) 284-9400, www.genartsf.org. Meow Meow and the Meow Meows play with Totimoshi Sat/25, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. $6. (415) 923-0923.