Mirror/Echo/Tilt is a performance and pedagogical project created by artists Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith to examine the language and gestures used to describe experiences of arrest and incarceration. This collaborative project between artists, educators and individuals affected by the justice system uses magical realism as a framework. Performative vignettes are translated through the body and recorded in vacant former institutions such as empty prisons and courthouses to consider how individuals might assert agency in the reclamation of physical and psychic space. Taking the form of video, performance, text, archive and curriculum, the work envisions new language around the way we engage with mass incarceration and inserts counter narratives into the dominant media landscape, which commonly alienates and criminalizes black and brown bodies.
In this workshop, artist Shaun Leonardo with members of the Brooklyn Justice Initiative at Recess Art introduced elements of the project to Art+Ed students as a way to imagine new interactions and ways of engaging the body as a site of historical memory, trauma and possibility.
Workshop hosted by Shaun Leonardo and peer leaders from The Brooklyn Justice Initiative.
