Shannon Brooks: Psychic Highway

Along the Erie Canal is a snake-like sliver of western NY known as the Burned Over District…

Shannon Brooks is a multidisciplinary artist working with movement, video, film, and performance. Their practice explores the relationship between invisible forces and the material world, and how that tension entwines in our bodies and our internal/external environments. Shannon understands Disability and access as a generative creative force that can change time, space, and power structures. Recent work has explored rocks, belief, access, the Erie Canal, memory, the Burned Over District, becoming a fossil, condensing time, blindness, ghosts, industry, chronic pain, magic, excavation, control, alienation from work, diagnosis, alienation from the body, interdependence, capacity. Shannon will present a full night of multimedia experience/performance entitled “Psychic Highway” a multimedia-performance-collage exploring the tensions between invisible forces and the material world. Transforming our bodies into rocks, we see through time, excavate ground and collect pebbles of memory, blindness, labor, Disability, ghosts, diagnosis, power, control, layered time, and American individualism.

Shannon Brooks is a founding member of Hook&Loop, a collective for Disabled artists in Philadelphia, and UNDUE BURDEN, a community archive and exhibition series led by Disabled people in Philadelphia. Shannon has received grants/funding from The Leeway Foundation, The Philadelphia Office for the Arts, and The Velocity Fund.  She is a part of Leah Stein Dance Company and has worked with artists such as Leah Stein, Annie Heath, Annie Wilson, Oona Taper, Tara Bayat, Donna Oblongata, and Dawn States.