Jan Brugger is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and administrator that engages a variety of media and production strategies to craft colorful formations that activate the senses with attention to physicality, rhythm, and mise-en-scène. Vibrant constructions floating on a quiet body of water; rigid paper balancing on rusted metal; dissembled mannequin parts posing across a statued scene; secret messages blurring into moody, amorphous pools. These objects offer opportunities to increase bodily awareness and reconsider how we experience and relate to the world.

She stages distorted versions of reality that amplify the counterforces that vibrate between everything. In "Fête, galante et volupté", an installation/durational performance piece based on the fête galante painting genre, servers performed tasks in 10-minute increments that emphasized undertones of object v action, luxury v labor, noun v verb, and life v death while 3 models idly lounged on and around sculptural elements as soaked, watercolor papers dried and molded to their poses. Part sculpture, part temporary land art, and part happening, the post-apocalyptic compositions in “Devices Used to Stay Afloat” are photographed on the aqueous abyss of Lake Michigan as islands of anxiety or unease. The rigid, partially dissolved watercolor paper of the “parched” sculptures flirt with rusted metal armatures performing as figures frozen throughout the gallery.

She received her MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA in visual art and dance from the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been screened and exhibited throughout North America. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.