Second grade, 1954, dress by Mom, hair by Mom
Biography
Jane Gilmor is a nationally known intermedia artist and Professor of Art at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and did undergraduate work at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and Iowa State University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 30 years and has been awarded two NEA Artist's Fellowships, a McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at The McDowell Colony among others. In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Portugal. Her most recent solo exhibition was at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. In 2008 she co-curated Where Are You From: Contemporary Portuguese Art, with Lesley Wright, Director of Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College.Most recently she has exhibited at Performa Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal, A.I.R. Gallery in New York, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha. She is included numerous books including Barbara Love's Feminists who Changed America 1963-1976, Lucy Lippard's, OVERLAY, Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and Gerrard's The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970's, History and Impact, Abrams. Her work is in numerous collections including The Des Moines Art Center, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Bemis Foundation, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She is affiliated with A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Olson Larsen Galleries in Des Moines and has been reviewed in numerous journals including The New York Times. The New Art Examiner, and The Chicago Tribune.
Artist Statement
My latest work presents room-sized installations of wearable structures activated with robotics and embedded with video. Extending from previous work in my Containers for the Self series, these situations further explore those psychologically and culturally based entanglements of image, language and space through which we try to locate our own identity.In the installation Blind one enters the gallery and is confronted by a seven-foot high cave-like structure tracing its roots to a wheelchair accessible, camouflage hunting blind. Shining through a slit and projected on a nearby column is a video loop of my hand endlessly unzipping a zipper. Around this larger phallus-filled igloo several smaller motorized versions of the hunting blind circulate, helpfully dispensing Kleenex, vacuuming up and responding to remote control demands from viewers.
…We cannot help but be swept away by the slapstick spirit, checked by a note of dread and caution supplied by the hand in its endless Sisyphussian pursuit of the completed zip. Everything, and everyone (including, crucially, the artist herself) is caught in a permanent vicious cycle, a perverse closed loop of good will, bloodlust, vanity and pure brilliant stupidity. (Matt Freedman, Blind catalogue essay).
Earlier wearable structures, The Architecture of Migration and The Architecture of Fatigue explore the dualities of presence vs. absence and border issues relating to public/private, rural/urban, poverty/privilege, and life/death.
For the past thirty years, then, my practice has been concerned with social issues, found situations, and psychological narrative. From The 1976 All-American Glamour Kitty Pageant, to my 70's and 80's photo tableaux of cat-masked Isadora Duncans in the ruins of Greece and the bowling alleys and Laundromats of Iowa, to my twenty years of community-based public work in shelters and hospitals--my search is for some unspoken connection in these random collisions of objects, images, and voices.