Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Their research based practice focuses on violence as it exists in/is enacted on the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas. They render this violence elastic and atemporal--leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, immediacy and possible generative afterlives. Using lived experiences as a point of departure, they address violence’s impact on themes of (post)coloniality, affect, migration, intergenerational trauma, queerness, difference and healing. While complicating the viewer's understanding of economic and social marginalization in the region, their practice also desires to test the mettle of these same frameworks. Through their interventions, they aim to temper what we have known to be true with the potential of intuitive knowledges that have been historically cast aside in favour of Western assimilation.
They hold a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently, they are a MFA candidate at University of California, Los Angeles.
They are a regional proxy for Black Lunch Table and they obsess about residencies at asmall.place.
