Friday, March 22, 2019

Kearra Amaya Gopee: Work in progress

Wednesday 27 March, 2019, 7 pm, at Alice Yard


Artist Kearra Amaya Gopee has been in residence at Alice Yard during the month of March 2019. On Wednesday 27 March, they will present recent video work and a new installation in progress.

The video work Artifact #3: Terra Nullius is the self-referential final peg of a three-part work that visualises how personhood, family, and intimacy are influenced by lineages of trauma and spirituality within diasporic Caribbean identity. This piece closes the artist’s Artifacts series, a trilogy exploring how migration and memory affects manifestations of the Anglophone Caribbean family from the pre-Independence period to the present, using Gopee’s own family history as a point of reference.

Employing scrying and speculative non-fiction to demonstrate agency in crafting models of communication and care within the present, Terra Nullius abandons nostalgic desires for the biological family structure in favour of alternative kinships. The term “terra nullius” is “used in international law to describe territory that may be acquired by a state’s occupation of it.” Here, the state refers to that of being, one that is constantly being renegotiated with the entry/exit of new modalities with which we engage each other and subsequently reconstruct the self.

All are invited.


Kearra Amaya Gopee’s practice focuses on the nature of violence and erasure, and the particularities of that which is inflicted on the Caribbean by the global north. Using personal experiences as a point of departure, they address themes of migration, intergenerational trauma, queerness, and difference while seeking to complicate the viewer’s understanding of economic and social marginalisation in the postcolonial Caribbean. Through photography, animation, video, installation, coding, sound, and handicraft, their observations are translated into ephemeral photographs, installations, and objects. Their work interweaves the personal with the historical, the mythological with the material.

Gopee is a visual artist and photographer living and working between Carapichaima, Trinidad and Tobago, and Brooklyn, New York. They have been included in recent exhibitions at AC Institute, Jenkins Johnson Projects and the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. Gopee has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Centre, ACRE, and NLS Kingston, and will be in residence at Red Bull Arts Detroit this summer. They hold a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018.