Dispatches

Shannon Brooks is a multisensory, multimedia artist grounded in iterative, time-based experimentation. My practice engages with the full range of our senses and draws on ritual, material, and performance, to construct strange worlds between the physical and the ephemeral. Shannon approaches materials as living entities that hold historical memory fossilized in their bodies, existing in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming. Their practice researches the interconnected systems between ecology, the body, performance, expired film, disability, power, clay/rock, residue, ghosts, geologic time, movement, textiles, and memory. Shannon's practice decentralizes sight as the ultimate means of validating experience, creating cacophonies of textures and sounds to explore the dimensions of our senses. As a Disabled/low-vision person, Shannon understands accessibility as a creative force that transforms time, space, and power structures.

Shannon has presented work at Movement Research at Judson Church, DarkRoom Ballet, ArtsonSite, Fringe Arts, The Painted Bride, TechOWL, Fleisher Art Memorial, The Soil Factory, AUTOMAT, Vox Populi, and Icebox Project Space. They have received support from The Velocity Fund, The Leeway Foundation, and The Bartol Foundation. Shannon is a founder of Hook&Loop, a collective of Disabled artists in Philadelphia, and UNDUE BURDEN, a digital community archive led by Disabled people in Philadelphia, through which they have programmed events with artists such as Krishna Washburn, Kayla Hamilton, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, iele paloumpis, and HYP-ACCESS. Their work in accessibility has been published or presented through Yale Accessibility Symposium, WHYY, and Theater Journal, and Philadelphia Death and Art Festival.

https://shannonbrooks.cargo.site/

What they are working on: 

“S3AWRACK” is a practice to transform into gooey, demonic algae divas that digest the petro-plastics infused in our ideological walls and cavort with the shitty parts. This practice researches the generative qualities of algae, raving as ritual to transform personal and global ecosystems, and ecology(economy)’s capacity for change.

Imagine some sort of laboratory, petri dish, or gymnasium where an entanglement of people (“performers”) work with deviant objects made of ceramic, agar, mycelium, natural fibers and trash. These sculptures (bodies) will be transformed through a series of choreographed and improvised performances crescendoing into a scientific frenzy, covering you in generative a pop star goo. 

Imagine smearing a clay log out onto the pavement, human fountains, agar potions poured over asphalt, weird faces, earrings attached to solar powered RC cars, RED WAXY LIPSTICK, mycelium bikinis, composting, your mom in the 90’s singing Ditto’s “White Flag” in the car with her hand out the window holding a cigarette dreaming of another life, figuring out how to use car exhaust and spent oil as a material.

Performers and collaborators:
Chloe Marie 
Micah Lat
Zeze Schorch
Sheila Zagar 

Mawu Gora is a Brooklyn native currently residing in Philadelphia. As a Black, queer, Caribbean, and transdisciplinary artist, their artistic practice studies rhythm, ritual,  connection, and relatability. They are a graduate of Georgian Court University (BA) and Temple University (MFA). As a freelance artist, they have worked with Cardell Dance Theater, Big Dance Theater, and Jupiter Performance Studios. They are the founder and director of the project-based company, Ma’at Works Dance Collective, and an adjunct professor at Bryn Mawr College. They are currently collaborating with Kosoko Performance Studios on //shrouded\\.

What they’re working on: My transdisciplines serve as a healing art, both through resistance, hauntings, and cultural memory; ritual enhances imagination.  My curiosity is tethered to storytelling as a Black temporality into the interior. Black feminist scholarship bolsters these beliefs, as the Combahee River Collective reminds, "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression."Additionally, I'm interested in Fannie Lou Hamer's teachings that the land is our ally and our relationship with it is inherently liberatory. In this shape, art is a conduit, our bodies are constellations, and the dirt holds our stories, location is memory: the sand beaches, tar pits, and clay roads. Liberation points to ecologies of living mirrored in our relationship to the land. Ritual, lovemaking, stories, and the everyday become potent source material for these rebirths. My artmaking investigates the past through the eyes of those who have lived it. Ancestral stories are quintessential to understanding art as life.

www.mawuniverse.com/maatworks