Jaret Vadera is an artist and cultural producer working between New York, Toronto, and India. Vadera works across media, primarily in the spaces where painting, photography, video installation, and new media intersect.
Early life and education
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. Vadera is of Indian, Filipino and Spanish descent. His parents were working-class immigrants who practiced different religions, and spoke different languages. 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." In 1999, Vadera graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and participated in the Mobility Program in Fine Arts at the Cooper Union School of Art the same year. He received his Master in Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2009.
Career
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.
Selected exhibitions
Vaderas paintings, prints, photographs, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened internationally at:
