Yoab Vera (b. Mexico City 1985) is graduating with an MFA in Drawing and Painting from University of California Los Angeles in June 2021, where he also studies and practices meditation at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He received a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History with a concentration in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2013, and studied Architecture in Mexico City at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is an awardee of the Beca JUMEX Foundation 2019-2021 and a Moss Scholar 2018-2021 from the UCLA School of the Arts & Architecture.

yoabvera@gmail.com

Yoab Vera’s work is buoyant, modular, and transitory. He often hybridizes materials from the everyday urban environment into his paintings and installations. The surface of his work is used as an impermanent field of possibilities for affective translation and recognition. He calls his practice, haptic contemplative painting and uses meditation as a tool to slow down. Throughout his mindful movements both in his garden studio and afield as he transverses cities, he explores qualities of tactility, sensation and perception as they relate to bodily, mental and spatial states of awareness.

Vera’s installations are an index of gestures that chart the relationship between objects, subjects and his own experiences in Mexico City, Los Angeles and the various places in which he finds himself. Through his study and practice of self-awareness, cognitive science, and psychological research, his work embodies a dynamic integration of contemporary neuroaesthetics and ancient contemplative and ritualistic traditions.

Vera engages quotidian material culture in non-hierarchical ways: walls, moldings and concrete architectural structures are invaded by traces of vegetation and the thermodynamics of the environment. In his paintings, patinas emerge from the amalgamation of diverse matter. He uses graphite, pastels, oil-sticks, oils, and household paints. He embraces chance; incoming dirt, rainwater, morning dew, and direct sunlight. The armatures for his paintings are built with wire, brick, concrete, plywood and extruded polystyrene. He utilizes fabrics that relate both to the body and the history of painting. For Vera, color is likewise material, a ubiquitous and perceivable substance that transmits the heart of everyday life.

The current musical arrangement is a collaboration with composers Anna Bettendorf, Cole McQuinn, and Caden Potter, from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. 
The sound playing is an improvised composition based on reading-musically the various and interconnected works of the installation thesis. This is based on the concept of a tonal poem, where a visual art work is intended to be interpreted through music . In addition, the aforementioned composers arranged recorded sounds from the garden in Mexico City where the paintings were made prior to being transported to Los Angeles.