Work by Keysha Rivera, Trécha Gay Jheneall, and Keiaria Williams

“Water overflows with memory. Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.” – M. Jacqui Alexander

Water stands as a fluid site of ancestral memory, with memories that anchor and act as an essential resource to both the tangible and spiritual world. In other words, the immaterial materializes, and the intangible is made tangible through bodies of water (Alexander 2015, 292). Wata Ways explores interconnected waterbodies of the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Gulf, as fluid sites of memories and pathways for Caribbean diasporic people. These sites of memory serve as vehicles of expression through storytelling, movement through rituals of migration and water memory as an archive.

Keysha Rivera is a textile and media artist of Afro-Indigenous descent living in the South. Her work revolves around cultural preservation and the configuration of displaced histories. Rooted in the connection of material and process, she creates soft sculptures, paintings, and installations that point to the conversation around the vulnerability of home, Caribbean identity and the tenderness of memory and remembrance. Her familial research acts as a guide for the creation of works. Centered on Puerto Rican liberation, her art functions as a contemporary form of resistance to the present-day realities.

Trécha Gay Jheneall is a fluid, Jamaican visual and performance artist currently living in New Orleans, LA. Their work engages mediums of screen printing, installation, performance and video. Their artistic practice is concerned with witnessing Afro-Caribbean People and our ways of propagating diasporic communities within the world, particularly through sound and material culture. They see their work as a conduit between personal epistemology and collective history and their intimacies occurring through migratory patterns, material, visual and auditory culture, spiritual beliefs, and practices within the region. Through video, performance, sound, and installation they (re)produce transgenerational experiences in migratory and labor practices and explore their relationship to music and sound as a means of reconciling the interconnectedness of the Caribbean region.

Keiaria Williams explores the human condition and the paranormal. Often guided by material, she is thinking about history, trauma, space, relationships and connection. She draws from her position to reflect the world around her and the world within. Within, there is the presence of her ancestors and in her work they move together. She is pulling from this sublime connection, yet she is still creating a language to communicate it. She is creating a language from her own DNA, from ancient motions like braiding, from color, code, and from sound. She has found herself working with temporal subjects like plants, and the body collaboratively with media, programming and photography as tools. Performance art captured in video has been the vehicle for her to free the ephemeral sculptures from time and space and ensure her presence in the work.

OPENING DURING MARCH ARTWALK

March 8 @ 6 PM

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: