Jane Gilmore
A response to Rachel Yoder
Artist Statement
Two months ago, driving my little KIA back from a California residency, the Great Salt Lake appeared. Loaded down with a new series of wearable whatevers, I visualized dragging myself across this salt desert with a small band of women, all of us wearing versions of my latest getups. Back home awaited an email from Prompt with Rachel Yoder’s “The Traditional Room.”
An amalgam of cultural critique and intuitive response to personal experience, my Containers for the Self are wearable structures investigating those entanglements of image, language, and space through which we try to locate our own identity. Depriving the wearer of touch, vision, and mobility, they explore the dualities of presence/absence, public/private, poverty/privilege, or female/male through found materials and forms. The search is for some unspoken connection in these random collisions.
List of Images
(All found materials, 2000-2018, from the Containers for the Self series)
1. Great Goddesses: Cleanup in Aisle 5
2. Lesson #3: You’re on the Wrong Road.
3. Great Goddesses: Do You Have a Light?
4. SWARM
5. SWARM (detail 1)
Responses to Rachel Yoder's Work
Jane Gilmor
Jane Gilmor has exhibited nationally and internationally for four decades. One of five artists selected nationally, Gilmor received a 2011 Tanne Foundation Award for her career achievements, and she has been a Fulbright Scholar as well as the recipient of two NEA Fellowships, a McKnight Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at The McDowell Colony. A.I.R. Gallery in New York published Jane Gilmor: I’ll Be Back For the Cat by art historian Joy Sperling in 2014. In 2017-18 she exhibited in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, and she was the George A. Miller Endowed Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Her work is included in numerous publications, including Cabinet, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Lucy Lippard’s OVERLAY, and Broude and Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art. Gilmor studied at Iowa State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is an Emerita Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is affiliated with A.I.R. Gallery in New York.
You can find out more about her work at www.janegilmor.com.