Jaspal Birdi captured in her studio. Greater Toronto Area, 2025.
Jaspal Birdi (B.1988, Toronto) is a Canadian artist who combines photography and painting through creative mis-use of modern technologies. She reconstructs virtual and physical realities with cross-cultural experiences to explore memory, perception, and resilience. Birdi holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University in Toronto (2010), completed a Museum Internship at The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (2011), and earned a Master of Arts Management from Istituto Europeo di Design in Italy (2013). Her work has been recognized by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts and has received numerous awards, including the 2013 Arte Laguna Solo Exhibition Prize, the 2017/18 Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Artist Residency and Stonefly Art Award, and the 2020/21 Fondazione Culturale San Fedele Visual Arts Fellowship’s Martini International Award.
In 2017, Birdi co-curated the exhibition Command-Alternative-Escape for the opening week of the Venice International Art Biennale. During the 2018 Berlin Art Week, her works were presented in Transferred Recall, a curated solo exhibition. In 2020 Birdi presented Can I Play Outside? a solo exhibition supported by the RBC Foundation Emerging Artist Residency at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. In 2022, she exhibited Eyes Looking Without Seeing, a solo show at the Women's Art Association of Canada in Toronto. In 2023, her works traveled to Italy for Occhi Che Guardano Senza Vedere, a curated solo exhibition at Fondazione Vittorio Leonesio. That same year, Richmond Art Gallery presented her public artwork 11h02m at Canada Line Lansdowne Station as part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver. In 2024, Birdi presented Between Standing and Moving, a solo exhibition at Trotter&Sholer in New York City. Currently, Jaspal Birdi’s piece 16h57m is featured in the Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s permanent collection exhibition Homage.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a young kid, I believed people lived inside my television set. How else could Mr. Dress-up appear through the tube? If I had been allowed to break the glass barrier between Sesame Street and my living room, I could have enjoyed mouthfuls of cookies. Despite my fantasy of jumping through a “looking glass,” I soon learned that was not the reality. My television was old and unexpectedly began showing glitch-like symptoms, automatically changing channels and distorting colours and figures.
When our devices succeed in their attempt to mystify their actual functioning, there is no longer a clear distinction between illusion and reality. With social interactions increasingly occurring through a visually sharp and smooth flat screen, the filters, alterations, or defects in the represented are veiled by the continuous flow of content.
Blurring the boundaries between a window and screen, I utilize smartphones, laser printers, software, and paint to create lens-based works full of colour, texture, and errors. I push the limits of print technology to the point it releases data—photographs captured from life—impressionistically. I use paint’s loose, chromatic, and illusory qualities on thinly transferred scenes to revisit and restore the unseen and internal. Juxtaposed layers of actual scenes and materials explore the nature of memory shaped by physical and virtual realities. Balancing between secure and free, my works provide space for an open exchange.
Jaspal Birdi thanks and acknowledges the support from:
