In August 2019, artist Melanie Crean lead an intimate walkthrough of the exhibition “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” followed by a poetry reading by Jess Saldaña1, a Chicanx muralist, poet, performer, and analogue film photographer from the industrial Southside of Chicago, whose writing focuses on decolonizing, movement, visual and linguistic theory in relation to the queer minoritarian subject, hauntological totality, the plurality of being, fungibility, reproductive labor, digital labor, and corporate detritus.

This program was part of A Possibility that Exists Alongside, a series of artist-led gallery talks and poetry readings highlighting the capacity of voice—through writing, speech, and movement—to challenge, provoke, and create new possibilities. Mirror/Echo/Tilt (2019) was a video, performance, and pedagogical project created by artists Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith in collaboration with individuals affected by the justice system. Focusing on embodied gesture across fragmented and repeated vignettes, the multichannel video employed nonverbal forms of meter, pause, and syntax to counter narratives imposed by the carceral state.