The large format pages of an automobile mechanic’s instruction
manual have been co-opted. Their backs become the slates of
memory, dream, and document - tablets of texture and fabric and
layers of images and pieces of art and life. This installation is an
excerpt of a larger body of work comprised of eighty pages -my
Auto/Biography/Charts.
These assemblages combine painting, sculpture, photography,
and printmaking in a single format. They are memorials to people,
places and points in time - itineraries of my experience.
Light in the Head is a multidisciplinary work incorporating
images, texts, light and candles. Movement, perception and
boundaries of time, space and memory are some of the issues
addressed in this memorial to a my dear friend, James Willis
Burks, IV, and to the multitude taken by the HIV virus.
Jan Gilbert is a native New Orleanian, an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator. Her works mine memory, loss and transition and have been shown widely in galleries, museums, cultural centers and often as public art on city streets across the United States and abroad. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts, Louisiana Division of the Arts, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, have awarded her individual artist's fellowships. Her projects have received support from the NEA/Rockefeller Initiative for Interdisciplinary Artists; Art Matters, Inc.; The Warhol and Ford Foundations; the Trust for Mutual Understanding; and the National Association of Artist's Organizations. Gilbert is a cofounder of the artist/writer collaborative The VESTIGES Project. Beginning in 2006, the collective spent three years working under the auspices of a roving residency with New Orleans' Contemporary Arts Center, where she more recently served as Interim Visual Arts Director. Throughout her tenure with VESTIGES, she has directed, produced, and participated as a core artist in a wide variety of collaborative public art projects that include video, performance and site interactions. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of New Orleans (1980) and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Tulane University (1982). The Arts Council of New Orleans honored her with a Community Arts Award in 2013. She recently guest curated a New Orleans tricentennial exhibition in collaboration with The Historic New Orleans Collection Art of the City: Post Modern to Post Katrina.