“Jane Gilmor: Breakfast on Pluto,” through February 6

Through Sunday, February 6

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

A sculpture showcase employing repurposed past work and found materials from the recesses of her studio, the installation Jane Gilmor: Breakfast on Pluto will be displayed at Davenport's Figge Art Museum through February 6, with the arresting work – one activated via motion and light – encouraging visitors to contemplate the interplay between light and darkness, the familiar and the strange, and the past and the present.

As stated at her JaneGilmor.com Web site, “Gilmor is an intermedia artist and Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She has a BS from Iowa State University, an MAT and MFA from the University of Iowa and additional graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 35 years and has been awarded 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 exhibitions were at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, Long Island University in Brooklyn. In 2010, she completed a yearlong community-based project and major installation, Un(Seen) Work, funded by an NEA grant to Grinnell College in 2010.”

"She has also recently 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 1970s, History and Impact. Her work is in numerous collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art library, 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 included and reviewed in numerous journals including Cabinet, the New York Times, the New Art Examiner, and the Chicago Tribune.”

In her Artist Statement, Gilmor writes, “My latest work presents, walk-in books covered with etched metal notes, room-sized installations of wearable structures activated with robotics and embedded with writings on metal and 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. For the past 30 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 '70s and '80s photo tableaux of cat-masked Isadora Duncans in the ruins of Greece and the bowling alleys and laundromats of Iowa, to my 20 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.”

Jane Gilmor: Breakfast on Pluto will be on display through February 6, with regular museum hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays (10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursdays) and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Museum admission is $4-10, and more information on the installation is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.