About _________________________________________________________________________
My work explores the slippery nature of memory—how it folds, frays, knots, and reforms. Working primarily in watercolor and cyanotype, I am drawn to the tension between control and release, permanence and impermanence. Watercolor, with its transparency and unpredictability, becomes a collaborator in this exploration: a medium that allows me to risk, to let go, to return.
Fabric is a recurring motif and metaphor in my practice. It is a silent witness to our most intimate moments—grieving, resting, lusting, dreaming. It clings to us, holds us, remembers us. In recent work, I cut up older works on paper and weave them back together— not fixing what’s broken, but an act of restitching that mimics the way memory is continuously bent, folded, and reinterpreted. These fragments become mosaics of what is remembered, what is lost, and what we find again through the quiet labor of repair.
Bio:
Jennifer Shada (b. 1988) is a Bay Area visual artist living in Penngrove, California. After spending the summer studying at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2010, Shada received her B.F.A. at Sonoma State University in 2011. She continued her education at California College of the Arts and earned her M.F.A. in 2016. Shada has exhibited both locally and nationally including The Vast Lab in Los Angeles, the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana and in a “high altitude” exhibition in New York City, New York.
Shada works as a part-time Associate faculty at Santa Rosa Junior College and at Napa Valley College, teaching a mix of oil painting, watercolor, drawing and figure drawing. She also works with Sterling Graphics Vinyl Company in San Francisco installing vinyl graphics at the Legion of Honor, the De Young Museum, the Academy of Sciences and SFMoMA. In 2015, Shada co-founded artist collective ONE + ONE + TWO, aiming to bridge the gap between individual artists with resources in the Bay Area such as residency, critique and exhibition opportunities. She has worked as a studio assistant for artists Mario Pires Cordeiro, Nellie King Solomon as well as assisted the late, great Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in painting her “Supergraphics”.
