Jane Mulfinger is an American conceptual artist and educator whose art includes installations, time-based works and sculpture.University of California, Santa Barbara. Jane Mulfinger, Faculty. Retrieved February 15, 2019. Mulfinger has been based in Berlin, London, and since 1994, at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she is a professor. Her work collects and transforms human artifacts—ranging from found clothing or photographs to language (personal accounts, jokes, literature) to abandoned architectural spaces—in order to reflect on experience, perception, memory, and concealed histories.Dyer, Richard. "In the Light of the Anonymous," Jane Mulfinger: Selected Works 1988–1994, London: Dominic Berning Fine Art and Nick Silver, 1994, p. 13–16.Bush, Kate. "Sight Unseen," Jane Mulfinger: Selected Works 1988–1994, London: Dominic Berning Fine Art and Nick Silver, 1994, p. 30–31.Materson, Piers. Jane Mulfinger, Catalogue essay, Bruxelles: Damasquine Galerie, 1996. She has exhibited in the United Kingdom, the United States, Colómbia, Israel, and throughout Europe.Mulfinger, Jane. Jane Mulfinger: Selected Works 1988–1994, London: Dominic Berning Fine Art and Nick Silver, 1994, p. 5.Conti, Tiziana. "Jane Mulfinger," Tema Celeste, March 2000, p. 110. Reviews and features on her work have appeared in Flash Art,Curto, Guido. "Jane Mulfinger," Flash Art, Anno XXX, no. 205, Italy, 1997. Tema Celeste, The Times (London),Craddock, Sacha. "Boxer," The Times London, August 8, 1995. The Guardian,Williams, Richard. "Blood on the Canvas," The Guardian, August 4, 1995, p. 18. the Los Angeles Times,Knight, Christopher. "The Gildless Age: A Different Tale of the '1 Percent' at the Torrance Art Museum", Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2016. Retrieved February 15, 2019. The Economist,The Economist. "A European Lesson in British Humour, Le Joke," The Economist, London, October 17, 1992, p. 35. and La Stampa,La Stampa. "Lesistenza alla Galleria Carbone," La Stampa, Turin, January 18, 2000. among others, and on BBC Radio and Radio 1 Austria. Critic Richard Dyer wrote that Mulfinger's art "transforms spaces, both exterior and interior, breaks and inverts codes, laughs at the irrationality of language and shatters the syntax of remembrance the better to help us remember, not just the past but its meaning in the present." Mulfinger is married to artist Graham Budgett and lives and works in Santa Barbara, California.Ben Maltz Gallery. "3 Solo Projects: Jane Mulfinger, Ross Rudel, Elizabeth Turk," Los Angeles: Otis College of Art + Design, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 2019.
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. In 1983, she moved to West Berlin, where she studied with expatriate sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri at Hochschule der Künste, became friends with Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, explored found objects, and had her first solo show (Endart Gallery, 1987). After working on installation art during graduate studies at the Royal College of Art (MA, Sculpture, 1989), Mulfinger remained in London, gaining institutional (Arts Council of Great Britain and Unilever Sculpture awards) and critical recognition for shows at the Flaxman Gallery,Dyer, Richard. "Jane Mulfinger: Lost for Words," Art Monthly, London: Flaxman Gallery, 1991. Camden Arts Centre,Kent, Sarah. "Northern Adventures," Time Out, London', October 7, 1992, p. 43. Southampton Museum of Art,Stathatos, John. "Fotofeis," Portfolio, No. 18, pp. 13-22, 1993. and the Mayor Gallery,Courtney, Cathy. "In the Public or Private Domain," Art Monthly, September 1994, p. 179. among others.
In 1994, Mulfinger moved to Santa Barbara, California to accept a teaching appointment at UCSB. She continued to exhibit widely, with solo shows at Franklin Furnace Archive (New York, 1995), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 1995),Cooper, Emmanuel. "Boxer," Contemporary Art, January 1996. Galerie Guido Carbone (Turin, 1997–2008),Beatrice, Luca. Questo Mondo é Fantastico: Ventanni con Guido Carbone. Exhibition catalogue essay, Milan: Electa, 2008. Mayor Gallery,The Mayor Gallery. Jane Mulfinger, Exhibitions, Past. Retrieved February 15, 2019. Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (1999, 2004),Walker, Marina. "Dangling ‘Modifier," Santa Barbara News Press, December 3, 1999. p. 15–16. and the Otis College of Art & Design (2004). Her work has also been featured at Contemporary Art Society and Beaconsfield Gallery (both London), Armory Center for the Arts, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions for Beaconsfield and at UCSB.Myers, Holly. "Reaching for the Sky," Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2009, p. 49.Woodward, Josef. "Art Echoes in the Hallowed Halls: ‘Starting Here, a selection of Distinguished Artists from UCSB, ‘Work by Alumni Artists Who Passed Through During 1950-2010, Highlights the University's Art History," Scene Magazine, Santa Barbara Newspress, 2014.Beaconsfield. " "Summer FlatScreen Programme," Release, August 2016, Retrieved February 15, 2019.
Work and reception Mulfinger has worked with a wide range of materials, media and strategies; her approach has been likened to "an alchemist [who] turns the mundane and banal into something extraordinary."Berning, Dominic. "Foreword," Jane Mulfinger: Selected Works 1988–1994, London: Dominic Berning Fine Art and Nick Silver, 1994, p. 5. 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.Craddock, Sacha. Review, The Times London, August 24, 1994.Stathatos, John. "Jane Mulfinger, Berning & Daw," Untitled, Spring 1993, p. 14–5.
Installation works
Mulfinger's early work probed collective experience, memory and history through found objects, images and interventions in architectural space. In installations such as Norris, R.E. and Rhoberts I (both 1989), she transformed exhibition spaces into sites of contemplation and optical effects by sewing locally collected, discarded clothing into tarpaulins that were fit over skylights, creating multi-colored panels resembling cathedral stained glass.The Guardian. Review, Jane Mulfinger at Camerawork, The Guardian, August 1, 1990, p. B15. Beneath them, she altered the environments by painting walls, covering windows in fabric, and adding continuous benches or chairs. She sometimes projected images of seated individuals from different historical periods onto the benches.Morgan-Griffiths, Lauris. "Sole Searching," The Independent (London), July 21, 1994. Writers suggested that the work connected viewers to a cycle of life, death, presence and absence. Curator Kate Bush wrote, "unfolding through the passage of time, recuperable through memory, and incarnate in the objects we leave behind".
In related works, Mulfinger explored monochromatic effects (the all-blue Deluge, 1990), geographies, source materials and media. For Caught in Passing (1994)—done in residency at the New York Experimental Glass WorkshopNys, Rick. "Jane Mulfinger," Untitled, London, October 1994.—she cast 22 pairs of rejected shoes from Salvation Army thrift stores in crystal, reconstituting the abject discards into an homage to unknown lives that The Independent (London) called a "beautifully surreal" work of "ghostly translucence."The Independent (London). "Modern Icons: Shoes: Jane Mulfinger invites people to empathise with 20 pairs of shoes cast from pure crystal," The Independent (London), September 6, 1994. Retrieved February 15, 2019. 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.Castagno, Paolo. "Disabitudine AllArte," Sottosopra, No. 8, September 1991. For Armory as Cathedral, Beyond the Visible Spectrum (2002), Mulfinger covered the outside of two 45' x 7' skylights with tarpaulins of sewn garments facing the same direction, one red and one blue.Cheng, Scarlett. "Armory with New Arsenal," Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2002.Pagel, David. "'New Works' Show Reopens the Pasadena's Armory," Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2002. P. F24. 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.
Text-based works In the 1990s, Mulfinger frequently used found text and symbols in works that examined cultural history, the elusiveness of memory, and the simultaneous potency and limits of language.Jennings, Rose. "Fotofeis: Intimate Lives and Public & Private," Untitled, Summer 1993, p. 20.Stoddart, Hugh. "chora," Contemporary Visual Arts, April 2000, p. 58–9. In several series, she etched second-hand prescription eyeglasses with braille, Morse code or musical notation (Spectacles, 1991), poetry (No Vacancy, 1991),Hubbard, Sue and James Hillman, chora, Exhibition materials, London: 30 Underwood Street, 2000. 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.Dyer, Richard. "Jane Mulfinger," Performance, London 1991.Lillington, David. "Jane Mulfinger, Berning & Daw," Time Out London, December 30, 1992, p. 39. Critics, such as Sue Hubbard, described them as "subtle, witty and poetic" takes on the paradoxes of comprehension and mystery, illumination and blindness.Hubbard, Sue. "Beyond the Body," Contemporary Visual Arts, November 1998, p. 40–5.
Conceived against the backdrop of European Union negotiations and plans for the Channel Tunnel, Mulfinger's commissioned Common Knowledge (1992) featured thirteen ethnic jokes (in their original languages) about various Europeans, sandblasted onto glass panels installed without explanation in windows at the ticket office of Saint Pancras Station, the planned Channel Tunnel terminus. Critic Sarah Kent judged the work's exposure of publicly excluded, but privately common xenophobic discourse as "both funny and offensive"; The Economist puzzled over its intent and mix of the aesthetically beautiful, timely and "rude."