Artist Talk by Kevin Ramroop & Sampreeth Rao

Wave Art Collective is an interdisciplinary group of artists, educators, academics, and mobilizers creating art and educational programming to foster Scarborough’s creative scene. Currently working with the Doris McCarthy Gallery as Artists-in-Residence (supported by Equity and Diversity in the Arts, Department of Arts, Culture & Media), co-founders Kevin Ramroop and Sampreeth Rao will discuss their collaborative practice.

Kevin Ramroop is an experimental musician and writer from Malvern, ON. His artistic ethos is shaped by the entangled, phantom limbs from postcolonial affections that interweave the history, space, and culture of his roots in rootlessness. Subsequently, his artistic routing is as multitudinous in medium and form as the cultures that inspire them, with his work spanning across music, film, poetry, fiction, public installation, and community arts education. Kevin's music has featured on digital and radio outlets such as Okayplayer, Flaunt Magazine, Exclaim!, CBC Radio One and BBC Radio 1Xtra, receiving multiple composition grants from both the Toronto and Ontario Arts Council. His writing is featured in several publications and exhibitions such as the all-Scarborough anthology Feel Ways, the Hart House Review, and the Scarborough Arts Big Art Book; he received the Eugenie Shehirian Award in 2017 for Youth Literature.

Born near the cradling waves of Goa, India and raised in the diverse suburbs of Scarborough, Sampreeth Rao is a filmmaker who tells South Asian diasporic stories. His experimental film, Watching TV with the Mind Off, combined music video, fictional narrative, and archival footage to profile the coming-of-age ruminations of Indian-Trinidadian artist Kevin Ramroop. The work featured in the TIFFxInstagram Shorts Film Festival and Regent Park Film Festival, where he was awarded the RBC Emerging Director’s Award. In 2019, he was a researcher/curator with the Ward Museum, creating Block by Block, an oral history exhibition featuring four migrant communities in Toronto. Currently, he is working on Where the Trees Speak for Nuit Blanche 2022, an interactive audiovisual installation that utilizes the Rouge Park as a metaphor for migration in Scarborough. He is also the co-founder of Wave Art Collective, a creative arts incubator for Scarborough youth.