Jane Mulfinger

Jane Mulfinger is an American conceptual artist and educator whose art includes installations, time-based works and sculpture. Mulfinger has been based in Berlin, London, and since 1994, at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she is a professor. She has exhibited in the United Kingdom, the United States, Colómbia, Israel, and throughout Europe. Reviews and features on her work have appeared in Flash Art, Tema Celeste, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist, and La Stampa, among others, and on BBC Radio and Radio 1 Austria. Jane Mulfinger, Norris R. E. (details), recycled clothing, wood, paint, fabric, projection, 15' x 25' x 15', 1989. Site-specific installation at Royal College of Art, London. Shown: skylight (top), ground floor view with projection (below).

Life and career Mulfinger was born in Pasadena, California in 1961. While attending Stanford University (BA, Studio Art, 1983), she traveled to Florence, Italy in 1980, an experience that shifted her early art from painting to sculpture focused on the body, built environment and history. Camden Arts Centre, Southampton Museum of Art, and the Mayor Gallery, among others. Galerie Guido Carbone (Turin, 1997–2008), Mayor Gallery, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (1999, 2004), and the Otis College of Art & Design (2004). Critics such as Sacha Craddock suggest that a key strategy in her work involves putting everyday found objects and photographs—characterized by John Stathatos as "burdened with a haunting familiarity"—into disquieting or unfamiliar contexts and relationships in order to enable viewers to re-encounter them. —she cast 22 pairs of rejected shoes from Salvation Army thrift stores in crystal, reconstituting the abject discards into an homage to unknown lives The installation I Battuti Bianchi ("The White Flagellants," 1991) referenced the symbolic gowns of a historical sect in Carignano, Italy by sewing white, second-hand clothing into a hot air balloon-like structure housed in the town basilica, creating a cluster of associations around sacred and profane garments and the human desire for ascendance, through science and spirituality. Set at a former armory (now the Armory Center for the Arts), and exposed to wind and weather, the iconically color-coded panels pointedly referenced the nation's political, religious, and social divisions. In several series, she etched second-hand prescription eyeglasses with braille, Morse code or musical notation (Spectacles, 1991), poetry (No Vacancy, 1991), or first-hand accounts of intense sensory experiences (Lost for Words, 1991), often one word or phrase per lens; lined up on glass shelves, the dramatically lit, delicately shadowed pieces formed hard-to-read passages or paragraphs. The project began as an installation at Franklin Furnace Archive (1995); it featured locally collected regrets etched onto rear-view mirrors atop stilts that reflected projected, site-specific satellite and human imagery. Employing a mobile "confessional"-like booth and five roaming backpack units, they collected local regrets (later projected onto public spaces), and in return, provided participants with five algorithm-determined, similar regrets, intended to offer relief through solidarity. With Mobile Apparitions (2003), Mulfinger took this work out of galleries and into the streets of Los Angeles, London and Venice, wheeling large glass tubes and life-sized aluminum and glass boxes that slowly propelled enclosed feathers to bring ethereal moments of contemplation and visual pleasure into contrast with the fast pace of city life.

The Drunkard Forwarned and the Swearer Caution'd (1999–2004) combined Mulfinger's interests in text, time, and interactivity in an installation consisting of a silver Spandex-like bouncy castle that viewers sat on, projected floating clouds, and dangling silver plaques engraved with medieval virtues and vices that tarnished at different rates in a consideration of historical moral systems. The work incorporated performance (a two-mile, live model railroad construction and journey from Union Station to Chinatown, which also served as a quasi-historical tour), video, and a gallery installation in the New Chinatown Barbershop that included old maps from the archives of the Chinese Historical Society. Mulfinger installed four exercise bikes converted into power generators outside the entrance; rigged to light a glass crystal chandelier in the lobby, they revealed the still-elegant, symmetrical building design inside to viewers peering in when powered. She has been awarded a Microsoft Research Grant, Cambridge, UK (2005), British Council Travel Awards (1993–7), the OSARCA Prize (Royal College of Art Society, 1989), an Elephant Trust Grant (1989), and a Unilever Sculpture Award (1988).