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Sensoria: a zine by mayfield brooks and duskin drum – Danspace Project
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Sensoria: a zine by mayfield brooks and duskin drum

June 9, 2022

A mixed media artwork on white deckled watercolor paper, in the mediums of watercolor, pencil, butterfly pea flower tea, watercolor pencil, colored pencil, china marker, ink. A vertical composition centered on a periwinkle border with a bottom text that reads “A poem by Mayfield Brooks. Illustrations by Caedron Burchfield” A geometric-abstract oceanscape, with a distinct horizon line in blue and white, that bisects the the piece just below center. Across the top, hand stamped black capital letters read, “Whale Fall”. The text is bookended with two circles- a white moon on the left, a sulphuric neon yellow sun on the right. A grey wash of sky is blotted with puddles of black gradients. The sky is arced by a neon orange crescent, at the center of which is a red triangle pointing upright with a line across it. Below the horizon line in the sea is a wash of ocean blue gradients with a neon blue triangle at the center pointing down above a simplified drawing of a piano keyboard in black and white. On the horizon there are four interlocking circles at their radii like a compass, in gradient washes of butterfly pea flower tea- a grayish purple color. On the east-west axis it forms a vesica piscis, the center of which creates a mandorla, an almond like shape and a symbol of the whale. Half is black and the other white. Red outlined triangles frame the foreground and evoke cliff like beaches. Ovals to the bottom left and right are filled in with primary neon colors on the left, and gradient shades of butterfly pea flower tea on the right
Whale Fall Cover, mayfield brooks. Watercolor illustrations by Caedron Burchfield. Photos by Suz Murray Sadler.

 

Sensoria is a zine by mayfield brooks made in collaboration with designer and contributing writer, duskin drum. This zine is a companion piece to mayfield brook’s live performance  Sensoria: An Opera Strange (June 9-11), presented by Danspace Project as part of Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II).

mayfield brooks is a performer, artist, urban farmer, and originator of the interdisciplinary movement project, Improvising While Black. Sensoria: An Opera Strange is a continuation of brooks’ Whale Fall Cycle – a series of written, digital and live provocations based on a whale’s decomposition process when its body falls to the ocean floor and feeds thousands of sea creatures, the first of which was a Bessie Award nominated film entitled Whale Fall.

Sensoria: An Opera Strange is an invitation into different auditory fields inspired by whale songs, laments, acoustic uprisings, and revolutionary chants. “Questions emerging from this stage of the Whale Fall Cycle are: ‘Who am I feeding?,’ ‘How am I listening?,’ and ‘What ghosts am I dancing with?,’” writes brooks. “When the continual hum of extraction dominates the auditory field, how does one attune to the ancestor’s whisper, and feed the hungry disembodied ghosts of our time?”

 

This zine is dedicated to Indira Suganda (1965-2009).

 


 

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Tags: mayfield brooks, Platform 2022, Sensoria: An Opera Strange, The Dream of the Audience
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Phone (212) 674-8112
info@danspaceproject.org
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