JANE MULFINGER | BIO | CV | CONTACT

Jane Mulfinger is an avid collector of human artifacts, engaging her public in both conceptual and perceptual reflections on the significances of human activity in site specific installations, performance, and sculpture. Used clothing, second-hand spectacles, found texts, and a collection of WPA drawings of Los Angeles straddle the expansive view of her archives.  A graduate of Stanford University and the Royal College of Art, with Honors and Distinction respectively, Mulfinger’s early work is recognized as addressing the relationship between architecture, memory, and the human body. Her representation of the familiar disrupts and challenges our sense of site, history, and social milieu. As the collections continue to unfold, a series of work explores the mesmerizing effects of objects in motion, regarding the construction of visual spectacle itself, in the levitation of mundane upholstery feathers and fine down.  Her most longstanding work, the “Regrets” series, is a growing collection of anonymous regrets, most recently sponsored by Microsoft Research and the University of Westminster, and to Ars Electronica, Linz, 2007.

Mulfinger’s work has been seen in established venues such as the Mayor Gallery, Camden Arts Center, the Orchard Gallery, Franklin Furnace Archive, Ars Electronica, and the Southhampton Museum of Art as well as temporary off-site locations such as St. Pancras railway station, London, X-star video peep show in Paris, and a 17th century church house for widows in Belgium.  These satellite spaces are central to Mulfinger’s approach, utilizing existing contexts in the content of her pieces, while fulfilling the notion that the audience completes the work.  Rather than presuming the neutrality of a given space, Mulfinger posits the sociological, political, and formal/spatial contexts of architecture with the objects and text that she chooses to incorporate. Writing in Art & Design, John Stathatos describes Mulfinger’s work as a response to “the complex, fragmentary character of the contemporary city and the way this affects its inhabitants.” This approach can be seen in much of her work since 1989; “Common Knowledge,” an etched glass panels installed in St. Pancras Station, London, with collected European jokes in their original languages; “I Battuti Bianchi,” in Carignano, Italy that fuses the history of the space with the human desire for ascendance; “Armory as Cathedral, Beyond the Visible Spectrum” in Pasadena that features locally discarded red and blue clothing; and most recently, “The Fictive City and Its Real Estate: The Tale of the Transcontinental Railroad” that illuminates a specific history of urban revolving decline and renewal in the Los Angeles Chinatown(s) using the background of railroad construction in the West.  (For this work, Norman Klein collaborated with his essay, “The Three Chinatowns”).  Most recently, she has collaborated with Graham Budgett on two site-specific works in Linz, Austria, and London and in Cambridge, U.K.