Artist Talk: Knowing Kevin Amar Ramroop (Essay Sample)

Artist Talk
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Artist Talk
Kevin Ramroop
Kevin Amar Ramroop is a Toronto-based experimental musician and writer who works in a variety of genres. Having been raised by Indian and Indo-Trinidadian parents and having roots in Scarborough, which is a city known for its uprooted patterns of migrant routes from Indigenous, European, and Tropical cultures that intertwine and disentangle phantom limbs of postcolonial affectations, his artistic ethos aims to weave a liminal, harmonious pluralism that empowers his community and identity.
Kevin's artistic voice is as varied as his ethnic roots, articulated in equal parts epigram and epigraph across a palette of media including music, cinema, poetry, fiction, public art installation, and arts education for the public (Garcia-Fialdini, 2018). However, despite his broad range of interests, his attention remains centered on the formal language structures that underpin and are informed by every discipline in which he works and is interested; ultimately, an attempt to illuminate the modifications, codifications, and commodification of the historical frameworks that we have inherited as a means of communication.
Kevin has been published on the internet and radio platforms such as Okayplayer and Flaunt magazine with his music. He has also been featured on CBC Radio One and BBC Radio 1Xtra, and he has received numerous composition grants from both the Toronto and the Ontario Arts Councils. His work has appeared in several publications, and exhibits, most notably a short story for the all-Scarborough anthology Feel Ways and a co-written essay for the Scotiabank Contact Photo Festival. He was also the recipient of the Eugenie Shehirian Award for Youth Literature. Furthermore, Kevin is one of the founding members of the Wave Art Collective, a diverse collection of creatives and community educators dedicated to facilitating development and opportunity in Scarborough. In preparation for Nuit Blanche 2021, they are presently working on "Where the Trees Speak," an interactive audiovisual installation that metaphors Scarborough's migration past. The group will also be the artist-in-residence at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto in 2021.