At age 16, Amy Fisher was a high school prostitute and having an affair with Joey Buttafuco. She had also been charged with shooting his wife.

While Fisher was being prosecuted legally and shunned by the public, Buttafuco was being portrayed as an innocent victim.

“How does our culture do this?” artist Judith Yourman asked. “I found it really distressing that a story was framed in that way for that long.”

The media framed the story so that “he [Buttafuco] was not guilty for so long and that she [Fisher] was guilty for so long,” Yourman said.

Fisher’s story combined with those of other women offenders led Yourman, an East Coast native, to develop the “Female Offender Series.”

While living with her husband in Amsterdam, Holland, Yourman began thinking about the way women are represented by the legal system and the media.

“I began collecting books,” Yourman said. “One was about women in the legal system when I came across the words ‘female offender.’

“I was already developing ideas; these words helped me frame my project,” she said.

“The title has a double meaning,” Yourman said. “The body of the work deals with women who are literally female offenders.”

“The secondary meaning deals with how the women selected have committed legal and cultural morays,” she said.

Yourman said she is also interested in the way our culture tends to be more concerned about social morays than the actual crime.

The artwork itself is digital images with text and digital video, Yourman said.

“The work combines photographic images with passages from both recent and 19th century publications, including etiquette books, criminology texts and old Girl Scout handbooks, in order to reveal the outdated morality underlying the way these women have been represented,” Yourman stated in a press release.

“The work explores Victorian notions of gender that have influenced our perceptions and continue to shape our expectations of women today,” she added.

The series also features Susan Smith and Tonya Harding.

“When these stories are framed in the media, [the women accused] are seen as bad,” Yourman said. “We never see them transgress.”

Yourman’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed.

Showings include University of Toledo, Ohio; Artemisia Gallery, Chicago; CREDAC Contemporary Arts Center, Ivry, France; and Visual Arts Museum, School of Visual Arts, New York.

After this exhibition, Yourman will present a lecture, “Bad Girls and the Media.”

The lecture will explain the work, and she will speak about the combination of “contemporary media imagery with Victorian language to make people more aware how these ideas are still with us and how we think about women,” Yourman said.

The “Female Offender Series” begins today in Gallery 181, Design Center.

Gallery 181 hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. and Sunday 2 p.m. until 4 p.m.

Yourman’s lecture will be held October 23 at 7 p.m. in 1414 Molecular Biology.

For further questions, contact Gallery 181 director Barbara Bruene, 294-3038.