Jane Mulfinger
[1] 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.
[1][5] 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.
[13] 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).
"[25] 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.
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.
For Caught in Passing (1994)—done in residency at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop[30]—she cast 22 pairs of rejected shoes from Salvation Army thrift stores in crystal, reconstituting the abject discards into an homage to unknown lives[3] that The Independent (London) called a "beautifully surreal" work of "ghostly translucence.
[15][11][4] 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.
[42][4] Art Monthly wrote that the rear-view mirror metaphor "tease[d] poetic resonances out of unpromising materials;"[42] other reviews noted how the obscured legibility of the text acknowledged ambivalent desires for disclosure and secrecy.
"[41] In 2018, Mulfinger created a similar project collecting stories and images focused on guilt, called Spectral Latencies, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld in Germany.
The latter include sequential etchings on glass that chart formations of clouds (No Image No Matter, 1998), volcanic debris (Helen's Body, 2001) and hurricanes (Catarina, Fran, Hugo, Roslyn, 2015).
[50][22] The Fictive City and Its Real Estate: The Tale of the Transcontinental Railway (2004) focused the use of Chinese labor for the transcontinental railway and the demolition of the original Chinatown during construction of Union Station; with text contributions from urban historian Norman M. Klein and artist Annie Shaw, it probed the role of railroad construction in configuring borders, places and relationships, buried ethnic, racial and class narratives, and the subjective nature of accepted history.
