C E L L S
As a culmination of their installations in Never Apart's Upper Galleries B and C, Alisha Mascarenhas and Jordan Brown will present an emergent textual performance addressing the inextricability of the poem and the socio-political systems in which it is encountered.
From July to August 2017, Jordan Brown and Alisha Mascarenhas will inhabit Never Apart’s Galleries B and C on a weekly basis for a durational performance of live writing. Their work will address the inextricability of the poem and the socio-political systems in which it is encountered. The outcome is a living installation that explores the healing potentials of an ecological writing praxis. The rooms will become inclusive and connective environments to strengthen diasporic encounters: incubation cells for dialogue, disruption and generative silence.
Over time, they will materialize a work of poetic ecology composed of text, video, light, and objects that grows out of its physical and ideological surroundings. The rooms will be imbued with the cumulative materials of the poetic process.
Weekly occupations will occur between the hours of 12-5pm on Saturdays, during the opening hours of the Never Apart gallery space. During this time, the poets will work alone, together, or with invited guests to develop the works. Their process will respond to the space and the current exhibition(s).
Jordan Brown is interested in the body as a container for its own multiplicity: its many characters, creatures, motions, and surprises. Jordan's work explores writing as a moment of unsealing, both an act of self-inscription and a performance, and invokes the surreal, the grotesque, and the cinematic to animate the escaped voices. Jordan holds an Honours BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, QC.a
Alisha Mascarenhas’ work deals with inhabiting the turbulence of the present moment. In her writing, she is compelled by the mobilization of poetic language as a catalyst for healing that is both immediate and sustaining. Alisha’s current research is concerned with writing into an intimacy with fear, hesitation, and the unknown. She holds a BA in Post-Colonial Feminist Poetics from Concordia University and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montréal, where she currently resides. She will begin an MFA in Writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn as of Fall 2017.
The collaboration between Jordan and Alisha balances the act of creation with the space in which it happens: the light, the breath, the receptive and scrutinizing gaze of its witness. It is a material experiment in physical, emotional, and mental presence in an act of performative writing; a shifting discernment between what to expose and what to obscure.