Media artist to give performance and talk in Women’s Commission Art Gallery

January 16, 2018

DEFIANCE, Ohio - Performance artist Jetshri Bhadviya will be doing a performance and artist talk on Wednesday, Jan. 24, in the Defiance College Women’s Commission Art Gallery. The performance begins at 5:30 p.m. followed by the artist’s talk.

Bhadviya currently is a visiting professor at College of Creative Study. Through video, sound, performance and photography, she explores how a human body activates a space and how it is perceived in a social, political, religious and spiritual context.

“I use art as a way to give visual form to big philosophical issues, like what it means to be a conscious being, or the relationship between our minds, bodies and environments and what all of that means to me,” the artist notes. “By presenting a figure without identifiable characteristics, I am attempting to represent the concept of the soul within. It is my way of symbolically presenting the individuality and the individual self through the understanding of the nature and nurture; id, ego and superego; existential crisis; soul; body; religion and void, which is often also referred to as ‘the ipseity.’”

She has conducted workshops at Cranbrook and was a teaching assistant at American University in Dubai. Her professional experience includes serving as videographer for the Detroit Skyspace Project of James Turrell at the Detroit Riverfront and curatorial assistant for the contemporary department at the Detroit Institute of Art. She has additionally worked as a freelance designer, photographer and instructor for a number of organizations in Dubai.

Bhadviya has exhibited her work in North Carolina, Cave Gallery and David Klein Gallery in Detroit, the Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Society of Photographic Education in New Orleans, as well as many venues in Dubai. The Sheikha Manal Young Artist Foundation named her one of the top 10 artists in Dubai in 2011; she also received the Toby Dewan Lewis Fellowship Award in 2015.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from American University in Dubai and a master of fine arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

The one-day event on Jan. 24 is free and open to the public.

Defiance College, chartered in 1850, is an independent, liberal arts institution in Northwest Ohio offering more than 40 undergraduate programs of study as well as graduate programs in education and business. Defiance College has received national recognition for its educational experience of service and engagement. The college website is www.defiance.edu.