Visiting Artist: Jane Irish

Jane Irish's art invites confrontations between realms that rarely collide. Painting in egg tempera on large-scale canvas, paper and Tyvek, she infuses sumptuous interiors with memories of colonialism and orientalism. Irish incorporates imagery from her own travels through France and Vietnam, manipulating depth and angle to blur distinctions between inside and outside, landscape and decor. She further interweaves these labyrinthine interiors with the motifs and poetry of Vietnam War veterans, an impulse that began in 2005, when she organized the exhibition Operation Rapid American Withdrawal in response to the invasion of Iraq. Alongside her elusive and yet alluring painting output, Irish creates ceramic vases that address these questions of beauty and meaning through decorative and cultural patterns.
 
Jane Irish received her MFA from Queens College, CUNY, and has exhibited in New York and Philadelphia since 1983. Irish has had a solo exhibition at Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and has been included in exhibits at the Walker Art Center, Minnesota; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnatti; the Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a Painting Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.