Jared Peters is a contemporary artist engaged with themes of painting, history, power, and identity. His work investigates the formation of subjectivity through social discipline and regulated spaces, and the possibilities for independent agency from within these spaces. The paintings are sourced from immediate engagements with daily experience, and interactions with the conventional arrangements of contemporary life.

Jared Peters was a semifinalist in the 2011 RBC Painting Competition, and his work can be found in collections across Canada and internationally. He received a BA in History from the University of New Brunswick, a BFA from NSCAD University, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario. He currently lives and works in New Brunswick, Canada.

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Jared Peters

Artist Statement

2017

 

My painting practice focuses on encounters with the everyday, and how our behaviors, decisions, and identities are directed through the normal and normalizing arrangements of daily life. Through subjects that are banal and domestic, my paintings question the terms of how we can encounter the world around us. The paintings are sourced from my own daily interactions with environments and situations, but relaying these occurrences through painting allows them to be manipulated materially and analyzed formally. I am able to exert my own priorities and concerns independently from the directions mandated by the social conditions I depict. The painterly decisions I make within this formal language are therefore made on my own terms, ulterior to the practical or functional demands and expectations of the spaces and objects depicted. I want to open up possibilities and new potentials for encountering everyday, normal spaces, and to question and disorient the normative assumptions embedded within these spaces.

 

Painting is the ideal ground for staging these questions and investigations. It is a medium burdened by its own historical and material constraints and conventions, while also offering a site for active thinking. Through painting, I can materially and formally ground my interactions with daily life, as a means of confining the coercion, anxiety, and dislocation of contemporary experience onto a formal plane of criticality. The work often employs modernist pictorial and spatial strategies in order to question and disrupt the expected and aspirational arrangements of daily life. My painting practice can be a direct participation in the aesthetic language of daily experience, and I can work through these encounters within the material space of the canvas. My painterly gestures therefore seek to foreground this formal production of space, offering potential sites of resistance from within the disciplined, disciplinary space of painting.

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SELECTED WORKS