Jaret Vadera

Background

Vadera was born in Toronto in 1976. His mother and father both immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a large wave of immigration. Vadera"s father was born in India and his mother in the Philippines.

Education

In 1999, Vadera graduated from the Ontario College of and Design, and participated in the Mobility Program in Fine s at the Cooper Union School of (New York, New York) the same year. He received his Master in Fine s in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of (New Haven, Connecticut) in 2009.

Career

Vadera works across media, primarily in the spaces where painting, photography, video installation, and new media intersect. Early Vadera is of Indian, Filipino and Spanish descent. Vadera describes how growing up in his family, in Toronto, at that particular time, "set the stage for his ongoing explorations into the ways that beliefs, codes, and processes of translation shape and control how we see." Vadera works across media, primarily in the spaces where painting, photography, video installation, and new media intersect.

Through his work, Vadera explores how different social, technological, biological, and cognitive processes shape and control the ways that we see the world around and within us.

He often takes "things" apart, and puts them back together in new ways. Rorschach tests, algorithms, maps, infographics, and logic paradoxes are often redeployed to locate ambivalent in-between spaces, to reveal malignant meanings, and to explore the poetics of representation.

Mixing metaphors, shifting historical and cultural references, and code switching are some of his key strategies. Vadera seeks out the points at which these “given” sign systems break down, become permeable, porous or malleable, where glitches and short circuits upset our usual blasé consumption of images and data.

Vadera materializes the ever-changing flux of empirical scientific data-as-evidence, of measurement that offers quantitative information but does not add up to any qualitative meaning of being in the world.

By encountering Vadera’s accretions of objects and installations we learn that vision is filtered and fashioned with physiological, cognitive, linguistic and technological limitations. In parallel to his career as an exhibiting artist, Vadera has also been active as an organizer, programmer, curator, researcher, writer, editor, educator, and designer on projects that focus on using art as a catalyst for social change / justice.

Achievements

• Vaderas paintings, prints, photographs, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened internationally at: Maraya Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2015) Museum of Modern, New York, New York, United States (2014)(2013) Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, Indiana (2014) William Paterson University Gallery, Paterson, New Jersey, United States (2014) Bronx River Center, Bronx, United States (2014) Films Division of India, Mumbai, Indiana (2013) Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, United States (2012) EFA - Project Space, New York, United States (2011) Project 88, Mumbai, Indiana (2010) Tilton Gallery, New York, United States (2010) Religare s, New Delhi, Indiana (2010) Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, United States (2009) Triple Candie, New York, United States (2009) PPOW Gallery, New York, United States (2009) and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, United States (2008) Aljira, a Center for Contemporary, Newark, United States (2007) New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival, New York, United States (2007) Queens Museum, Queens, United States (2006)(2005) White Box, New York, United States (2005) Department of Canadian Heritage, Toronto, California (2005) Paved + New Media, Saskatoon, California (2005) South Asian Visual s Centre, Toronto, California (2004) PH Gallery, New York, United States (2004) A.W.O.L. Gallery, Toronto, California (2001) (2003) SOF House, Toronto, California (2002).