Watch the premiere event and Ariel René Jackson in conversation with Kearra Amaya Gopee here:
A Welcoming Place will showcase six conversations with Black and Brown Austinites, highlighting each individual’s relationship to the city of Austin, Texas. Excerpts from each conversation will form a video aided by visuals of the Austin area, and an animation made from archival film footage about ‘the weather balloon’ – a carrier for a mechanism that collects meteorological information. The project is a co-commission between Women & Their Work and YSI and the full film will be shown in January 2022 in Austin.
Ariel René Jackson (b. 1991) is a Black film-based artist whose practice considers land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Themes of transformation are embedded in their interest and application of repurposed imagery and objects, video, sound, and performance. Exploring how culture is inherited, Jackson modifies familial and antique farming, household, and educational tools and furniture, hacking each object’s purpose and meaning with nature-based material and weather based icons.
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. These histories, the immediate, and their possible afterlives are rendered elastic and atemporal, leaving ample room for their rearticulation.
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.
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