Stephanie Washburn & Jane Mulfinger
The Taft Gardens 2021/2022 Art in Nature Residency artists are Stephanie Washburn & Jane Mulfinger. Their Exhibition, displaying the culmination of 7 months working at Taft Gardens during their shared residency.
Shared Studio, Shared Objective
Read about the 21/2022 Taft Artists-in-Residence in The Ojai Vortex
STEPHANIE WASHBURN
For her residency at Taft, Washburn explores a series of sky drawings and a related video-project. Washburn creates the atmospheric imagery through layers of additive and subtractive work in ground graphite. She then slices the drawings in various configurations that leave the paper's structural integrity barely intact. The video focuses on the effect of the wind, breath, and voice blowing through cut strips of drawing. The work activates a material awareness, an uneasy sense of both delicacy and physical violence, in relationship to the Romantic skyscape imagery.
Washburn is an artist and teacher living in Ojai, CA. She works in a range of media and explores our relationship to the physical world and the concept of nature. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Claremont University, Fellows of Contemporary Art and Acme Gallery. It is in the public collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Agnes Gund Foundation.
Jane Mulfinger
In her series entitled, They Became Evanescent, Mulfinger painted images inspired by the Taft Gardens and surrounding landscape, seascape, and geology that have words tucked into them. She chose each phrase from a collection of texts that she extracted from literature and daily weather reports over time. Expressions that are ostensibly about fleeting climate conditions reflect much more about human perception than the words and phrases matter-of-factly state. She reveals temporal preoccupations - and awe - over a realm we cannot grasp in our attempts to describe something much larger than us.
Jane has received grants and awards from Microsoft Research, the University of California, the British Council, and Unilever, was a resident artist at the American Academy of Rome, and was commissioned for site-specific works in twelve countries. As a conceptual artist and UCSB educator, imbuing others with creative agency has become a part of her work while continuing her sensorial practice.