yrécha gay jheneall is a transdisciplinary fluid artist born and raised in Jamaica. Between childhood and adolescence, their life oscillated between Kingston and Portmore. Now living in New Orleans, Louisiana, their creative practice considers Afro-Caribbean people’s movement, memories, and homemaking rituals as practice toward a liberatory consciousness. yrécha aims to signify collective and individual notions of belonging, nativity, and embodiment through various modalities of wata, video, sound, performance, and installation – clarifying the relationship between the body, water and the land, activated within rituals and processes of labor, survival, death, and living. Previous works and collaborations include Black Brown Biennale, Alternate Roots and Black Discourse (UK). They have exhibited in their home and local gallery spaces, The Nic and Uptown Laundry. More recently they have participated in the group exhibition wata ways, at the Alabama Contemporary Arts Center in Mobile, LA and Le sanctuaire at UNO St. Claude Gallery. yrécha earned their MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Arts at the University of New Orleans and is currently employed as the Artist-Centered Program Associate at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. 

Gen)d(re is a multidisciplinary project that integrates performance, community workshops, and engagement culminating into an immersive installation and collective participation. Centering themes of fluidity in gender and sonic expressions, the project explores sound and movement as transformative elements of identity and cultural memory. In reference to Jamaican sound and material cultures this work will feature a custom-built sound system housed within fiber barrel drums, mounted on a handmade bamboo raft to be mobilized by acoustic streaming. Gen)d(re is an ongoing interdisciplinary project that merges their Barrel Series with their recent work, bwoiyant—an installation centered on a handmade bamboo raft constructed from memory. As both object and metaphor, the raft articulates buoyancy, and liminality. Anchoring a three-channel video projection, bwoiyant positions land, wood, and wata as conduits to diasporic memory and adaptation. Additionally, Gen)d(re will interrogate sound as embodied knowledge through a Caribbean lens, tracing queerness and its response to cultural inheritance as gateways to survival. Similar to marronage, Fred Moten’s theory defines fugitivity as a refusal to settle, a movement away from the grasp of legibility toward something freer, wilder, more uncontainable, refusing borders of geographies and identity in favor of crossing, flux and in-betweenness. Echoing Gloria Anzaldúa’s thoughts on fluidity in borderlands —those interstitial spaces where languages, cultures, and identities rub up against one another, where fluidity becomes survival. In this sense, Gen)d(re explicates the fluidity of gender/genre, nation/diaspora–as shifting currents of rhythm, resistance, return and re-forming of Black queer and trans Caribbean life

Portrait by Taja Janel