Sarah E. Brook and poet Alicia Mountain @ cHURCH OF MONIKA

Visual artist Sarah E. Brook and poet Alicia Mountain will craft a collaborative, creative conversation within Brook’s current show. Part dialogue, part interview, part reading and part performance, their piece will playfully explore the energy and intent of the work. What does my consecration look like? Feel like? Yours, ours? Who gets to call a thing by its name? Which angles can you feel inside your body? Is there a color that goes to your knees, your core? How does material hold you, release you? Are you (Mountain pokes at Brook) too serious? This piece is part of a larger ongoing collaboration between the two artists. Together they draw Brook’s sculptural text and Mountain’s visceral, embodied language together to find the new creative openings their co-practice can invent.

ALICIA MOUNTAIN’s debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy to win the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Four in Hand (BOA Editions, forthcoming early 2023). Her chapbook, Thin Fire (BOAAT Press), was selected by Natalie Diaz. Dr. Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver and is the 2020-21 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is a lesbian poet, based in New York City. Keep up with her on twitter at @HiGroundCoward.

SARAH E. BROOK is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and installation artist from the Nevada high desert. She has exhibited widely in NYC and was included in the 2019 BRIC Biennial in Brooklyn.  Brook has been awarded the 2019-2020 Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship (NY), the 2018 Media Arts Fellowship from BRIC (NY) and residencies from Marble House Projects, I-Park, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Jentel Foundation, Playa and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.  Public art sculptures include Open Shelter (Prospect Park, NY, 2016), Viewfinding, a collaboration with queer poets (Riverside Park, NY, 2018) and Align (Crystal Park, NY, 2019).