#Jana Rumberger

[refigured]

Metafictions: Jana Rumberger Installations. Opening on February 11 at 1295 Alabama Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

#not-my-art

[sfaioffical]

Working across material and scale, artist Jana Rumberger crafts narratives that exist between fact and fiction. This interview delves into her practice and the art of balancing her work as SFAI’s Associate Director of Recruitment for Admissions.

Briefly introduce yourself.

I’m an artist and arts administrator living in San Francisco. I have my BFA in Illustration, and a MFA in Painting from SFAI in 2007. I was a recipient of the Cadogan Fellowship for Painting in 2006, and have shown my work in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, Atlanta and Savannah, GA, Portland, and New York. I’ve recently completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) in Johnson, VT and Wildacres in Little Switzerland, NC.

How do you balance your life as an artist and your life as an art educator and administrator?

I describe working full-time and being an artist as having three full-time jobs. I aggressively balance my 9-to-5 job with making in my studio and engaging with the Bay Area art community.

I’ve had a lot of practice with that balance: I’ve been an admissions counselor, a graphic designer, a freelance illustrator, a teacher, and educational consultant, and an academic advisor. Before starting grad school I was working 45-60 hours a week helping to start and run a small school inside an advertising agency in Portland. I knew when I started my MFA that my financial situation would require a heavy workload again after school. I also knew that, as an artist, I had to make cohesive bodies of thoughtful work. I built these concerns into the conversations I had with every faculty member and visiting artist that I worked with, and have continued to build on these practices.

I am really an introvert, and I use most of that alone time to make. I also work out and meditate almost daily.

In what way ways would you say your work has evolved since you graduated in 2007?

While I was an MFA student I focused on drawing and sculpture, and started working in installation. Now my practice is a hybrid of all of those ways of working. A friend of mine says that I have about 14 different personalities, and I would say that is reflected in my work. I am constantly making, and every body of work is been different. But, the same ideas have remained interesting to me: building artifacts of real and invented stories and characters, literature, science, history, politics, underground movements, secret societies, art history, and memory.  

One series was a collection of large-scale painted drawings on paper (3 x 8 feet),The March Hare, which were on view in my two-person show at Aggregate Space Gallery in 2014. I was looking at images online of 1970’s Easter Bunny candids and researching the Easter Hare, who determined whether children were good or disobedient at the start of Eastertide. The eyes of these characters referenced photographs of soldiers and generals from the Civil War. I also pulled in allusions to rabbits as symbols of sexuality and fertility, and their use as symbols of sex and gender. The work is resolved through its lack of resolution, the haunting spaces between the finished works and the ideas that informed their creation.

My favorite aspect of the art-making process is installation, but I work in a tiny studio apartment. Residencies have offered a chance to create outside my space and connect with other artists, such as when I was at VSC in 2015 and had a great studio visit with Nayland Blake. We talked about how making art is leading the viewer down the rabbit hole (like in Alice in Wonderland) and at that point I was still standing at the edge of the hole. I think that conversation, and some of the sculpture experiments I was doing there, started me on the path that I’m on now.

Your practice has recently taken a turn. Could you tell us how and why?

In some ways this new work feels like an epiphany, but at the same time I think it just organically grew out of my life and work process. I’ve actually been making miniatures since I was 10 or 11, and in grad school I was revisiting a lot of the weird crafty things that I did as a kid: making paper cages out of scotch tape, sculptures out of orthodontist wax, and felt puppets. Buckminster Fuller and Italo Calvino are big influences for me, and the way they talk about solutions—they’re so perfect, they feel inevitable. That is what this work feels like to me: something that was there the whole time and I just needed to do it.

Last spring I was making paintings called Santa/President on felt; I felt like my work was all over the place, but I didn’t want to limit what I was doing. Around that same time I saw Samara Golden’s lecture at SFAI where she talked about the process of making the model for her installation at MoMA PS1. I see a lot of parallels in the way we approach making things, so I then made about 30 miniature Santa paintings and then just kept going.

I call the new work Metafictions. It’s a literary term that mostly describes stories where the author speaks directly to the reader, breaking down the wall between the fiction of the story and the reader’s understanding of reality. I’ve appropriated the term to describe how the work toys with the idea of context and the object in contemporary art.

Each metafiction is an installation of handmade miniature works of my own art—some are miniatures of paintings I made in 2001 or an installation I finished in 2006, while others currently exist only as miniatures. All are different cohesive bodies of work with their own concepts and materiality. This process allows me to connect all of what I do in a way that also plays with the idea of context and how that affects understanding.

Tell us about future projects or upcoming exhibitions!

My first solo show in San Francisco, at state in the Mission, opens on February 11, and runs through March 25. This will be the first time I will be able to install the miniature work alongside site-specific full-scale installation. I am so excited, and hope that everyone comes to check it out.

Learn more about Jana Rumberger’s practice » Learn more about SFAI Admissions »

Image credits: 1) Change in Average Income of the Top 1%, Productivity, and Average Overall Wages 1979-2013, Gold piano, Shannon, Taylor, 2016; Wood, acrylic, thread, paper, 18 x 24 x 12 inches; 2) Metafiction: Alchemical Laboratory, 2016; Wood, acrylic, plastic, scotch tape, wire, metallic pigment, shea butter, thread, fabric, 18 x 24 x 5 inches; 3) Metafiction from left: Disconnect Between Typical Workers’ Productivity and Compensation 1948–2014, Top 1 % vs. Top .1% Pre-Tax Income Share 1913–2013, Real Estate Equity versus Dow Jones Industrial Average 2001-2008, Modernist Alchemy, Modernist Alchemy, One Struggle of Memory Redact, 2016; Wood, acrylic, plastic, fabric, metallic pigment, thread, 18 x 24 x 4 inches.

[kunstcapades]

It's our 50th episode, and Marv has a history lesson that leads us to some very special off-brand drinks. We search the streets below for local artists with our knockoff Bushnills, and scoop them up in the gondola for a ride to jr. tiki. Jana Rumberger and Laura Kim join us for forgery, bad jobs, MTV, art crimes, and much, much more! Mid-show, Death Cheetah busts into the bar for an impromptu performance, and art heist tipper Nosey Joe stops by. It's KunstCapades episode 50!