Memorial to Bobby
from the VESTIGES Project: The Subject is War
a series of eight lighted bus shelters exhibited on the Canal Street median
in downtown New Orleans during the Gulf War.

"The Subject is War, a 1991 bus shelter billboard project in New Orleans created by Jan Gilbert working with Debra Howell, Marcel Lesseaux, and Kristen Struebing-Beazley, was scheduled to coincide with the National Conference for Photographic Education. Unexpectedly, the Gulf War, then becoming a controversial reality, provided a specific content that prompted the leasing agency to reject seven of the eight works intended to address war in general because they feared a violent reaction. Although Gilbert worked to edit the images, she also created an exhibition The Subject is War/The Subject Is Censored to display the original censored works, official objections, and subsequent modifications."

Threshold
series of projections in Exchange Alley, New Orleans,
in conjunction with an exhibition at Hall-Barnett Gallery.

"Jan Gilbert has long employed mass media techniques, with layers of mechanically reproduced images combined in a single work. Her focus has been the communication process itself - how we see what we see in order to know what we think we know. This approach is at odds with the traditional art history of 'precious objects.'

"Gilbert's exploration of an ordinary, even tawdry reality dissects not merely the image, but the mechanics of perception along with our assumptions about art, objects and reality. Her painterly surfaces and gilt-framed images turn those assumptions inside out, as what we reflexively anticipate as yet another precious object turns out to be a desolate flea market on a bleak stretch of Canal Street - an outpost of consumer society at its most marginal. A flea mart called '...art.'

"So Gilbert's Threshold is a kind of a joke, but it's quite a serious joke, a satire that functions as an x-ray of the vital systems of seeing and knowing, one that peels back layer upon layer of codes of cognition, perception and communication. But only if we take the trouble to think about it."
D. Eric Bookhardt, Transparent Object Catalogue