Jane Mulfinger
Professor and Chair
Site-specific installation, sculpture, and interactive art
Jane Mulfinger is an artist, Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Art at UCSB. She is an avid collector of human artifacts, engaging her audience in visceral and perceptual reflections on the significances of human activity in site-specific installations, performance, and sculpture. 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 collected through street performances in Cambridge, UK, Paris, Linz and Santa Barbara. By night the concise and often humorous texts are projected onto the cityscape in each location. Originally sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge UK and the University of Westminster London, the series has continued with iterations for Ars Electronica, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Le Cube, Paris in collaboration with Graham Budgett. A new series of constructed photography and exterior installations focuses on the concurrent effects of time passing [duration] and the movement [migration] of masses. Concretely, along with other architectural sites, this series utilizes the neglected and deteriorating hull of architect Julia Morgan's once elegant Pasadena YWCA building as a point of departure.
Publications have included 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. Radio interviews include BBC Cambridge, Radio 1 Austria, and a video interview with Le Cube Paris, Vimeo, and Daily Motion. Most recently, she has collaborated with artist/writer Stephanie Washburn on a series of papers and exhibitions based on their mutual interest in humor in contemporary art. A graduate of Stanford University and the Royal College of Art, with Honors and Distinction respectively, 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.
