JANE MULFINGER | BIO | CV | CONTACT

JANE MULFINGER, mulfinger@arts.ucsb.edu, http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/mulfinger
site-specific installation, sculpture, and interactive art

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. Her most longstanding work (since 1994), the Regrets series, is a growing collection of anonymous regrets, most recently sponsored by Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, and the University of Westminster, London, continued with iterations at Ars Electronica, Linz, in 2006, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Santa Barbara, 2007-2008, and Le Cube, Paris, in 2008. The series takes on the nature of human regret, proposing that the concise admissions and reflections are positive indicators of the potential for learning and renewal.

Mulfinger’s work has been seen in other established venues such as the Mayor Gallery, Camden Arts Center, Underwood St. Gallery, London, the Orchard Gallery, Derry, CCA Glasgow, Franklin Furnace Archive, New York, Southhampton Museum of Art, and Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, well as temporary off-site locations such as St. Pancras railway station, London, X-star video peep show in Paris, a disused industrial print factory in Newcastle with Projects UK (now Locus+), and a 17th century church house for widows in Belgium for the Belgian Bienal. These spaces are central to Mulfinger’s site-specific approach, forefronting 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 and history 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 architectural site with the human desire for ascendance; Armory as Cathedral, Beyond the Visible Spectrum in Pasadena transforms locally discarded red and blue clothing into pseudo stained glass; and The Fictive City and Its Real Estate: The Tale of the Transcontinental Railroad illuminates a specific history of urban 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”). Her most recent works include a site-specific installation that draws attention to the historic dilapidated Pasadena YWCA and an examination of the most popular swimming pool shapes of Southern California.

Publications have included articles in both art magazines and national newspapers including Flash Art (Italian version), Art and Design, Contemporary Visual Art, Untitled, The Economist, The Times (London), The Guardian, La Stampa, the Los Angeles Times, and regular coverage in London’s Time-Out Magazine under the direction of Sarah Kent. In 1994, a monograph of her work was published with an essay written by Kate Bush, (included in this packet), now Director of Exhibitions at the Barbican Art Centre and Richard Dyer, artist and critic. Radio interviews include BBC Cambridge, Radio 1, Austria, and a video interview has been published in Paris with Le Cube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion. Most recently, she has collaborated with artist/writer Stephanie Washburn on a conference paper for ATINER in Athens and a talk for the UCSB Art Dept. Symposium based on their mutual interest in discourse surrounding humor in contemporary art. Mulfinger is currently developing a new iteration of Common Knowledge that updates the series into an interactive, (street collection), digital format. She teaches a broad range of undergraduate courses as well as graduate seminars at the Dept. of Art and the College of Creative Studies, UCSB, focusing on spatial and sculptural topics in the formation of significant art.