Here, Barney’s an ordinary terrier with hair over his eyes; “First, I lull you into complacent stillness.
I lie down beside you, you think I’m asleep.
Then with my touch or glance, you hear thought.
I evoke potential, the way honey evokes its energy grid in bees, a morphic field evolving with willows.”
– from Animal Voices, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Touching is a poetry reading and video screening that will take place at The Hand on Saturday, May 4th, 2019. Tactile videos and redolent words will be provided by Adjua Greaves, Sara Magenheimer, Saki Sato, Megan Snowe, Morgan Vo and Asiya Wadud.
This will be the final event at The Hand’s Bushwick location before we move out. After three great years in this space we’re going to take some time to collect ourselves. We will make use of this new placelessness by finding new and exciting venues, and plan to continue showing experimental, unfinished, and unsellable projects. We’d like to thank the artists who shared our space, our landlord who supports the arts, and our wonderful neighbors and local businesses for being so welcoming.
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Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New Yorker, b. 1980) is a Pushcart-nominated poet concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany, the limits of language, and archive as medium. Greaves has most recently been published in the collections Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press, 2018), and Creature/Verdure (Pinsapo Journal : Issue 2, 2018), as well as in her chapbook Close Reading As Forestry (Belladonna*, 2017).
Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York–based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage. In syncopated progressions of pictures and words, Magenheimer pushes against the bounds of narrative, charting circuitous storylines through vernacular associations that invite individual interpretations.
Saki Sato studied at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, where she graduated in 2010. She has participated in residencies such as CCA Kitakyushu Research Program in Japan, and The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. She has screened her videos internationally in France, Germany, China and Japan, and regularly screens work in the New York area. Her sculptures have appeared in several group shows in New York, Philadelphia, Japan, and an outdoor sculpture park in Dallas, Texas. In 2016, she collaborated with two fellow female artists to create The Hand, a storefront gallery in the Bushwick/Ridgewood neighborhood. They regularly show emerging artists whose work is experimental, unfinished, or not commercially viable.
Megan Snowe works in a variety of mediums including installation, animation, text, drawing and sound. Snowe questions how we understand, strategize and quantify our immaterial and emotional lived experiences. With a BA in Russian Studies & Studio Art from Oberlin College (2008) and an MFA in Time & Space Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (2014) Snowe has exhibited and published throughout Europe, the US and online.
Morgan Vo is a poet and singer. Born in the Tidewater area in 1989, he studied at the Cooper Union and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and lives now in Brooklyn, NY.
Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, published by Nightboat Books in 2018. Her book Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse) will be out later this year. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation class for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. She is currently working on a collaboration with choreographer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili.