(your) body is a porous language

     (our) embodied connections

April 11 - May 31, 2026
Free & Open to the public
Saturdays & Sundays 1:00 - 5:00 pm
& by appointment

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 11, 4:00 - 6:00 pm

Curated by poet, performance artist, and Beacon resident Edwin Torres, the exhibition will feature work by:

Elizabeth Castagna
Todd Colby
Matthew Friday
Renee Gladman
Charmaine Lee & Gryphon Rue
Shanzhai Lyric
Erika Mahr
Tamalyn Miller
Gabriela Salazar
Sasha Stiles
Edwin Torres
Yara Travieso
Cecilia Vicuña
Millicent Young
Zina Zinchenko 

(your) body is a porous language : (our) embodied connections is an exhibition seeking transformative ways of relating through poetic structures. Works across and between disciplines traverse the permeable territory between bodies, emotions, words, and dimensions of physical architecture, the page, and virtual spaces. What curator Edwin Torres refers to as “language-making,” in the form of installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, digital media, movement, writing, poetry, fashion design, and sound art, simultaneously delineates and dissolves boundaries between mind, body, and environment.

Torres adds, "Our bodies are liquid vibrational forces that mirror the patterns of our human porosity, rewriting our connections with every move and utterance we choose. The transformative process of poetry's sense-shifting is a navigation between mind and body that art-making creates openings for. How we adapt to immediacy informs the architecture of our portals, embodying a poem’s dimension — to speak while listening. Across the many voices and forms gathered, this exhibit proposes how language-making can shape our willingness to interrogate a continually evolving world.”

Gallery Director Alison McNulty shared, “We are thrilled to welcome accomplished multidisciplinary poet, Edwin Torres, back to Ann Street Gallery as guest curator of our spring group exhibition. The curatorial role is an organic extension of Torres’ work, highlighting his brilliance as a poet and performer, building on his long-standing interest and engagement with visual and performing art and artists, and expanding his creative and thematic interests around space, language, materiality, sound, and the body into the 3D space of the gallery. We enthusiastically invite the public back to the gallery this spring to experience Torres’ ambitious, sensual, and intellectually rigorous group exhibition, along with an exciting series of programs also organized by Torres, including a poetry performance, a workshop, and an artist talk.”

Special Events & Performances at Ann Street Gallery: 
All events are free and open to the public;
space limited where RSVP requested

Click here for more details on all events.

(your) body is a poetry reading
Sunday, April 26, 3:00 - 5:00 pm
Carolina Abreu, Brenda Coultas & Edwin Torres (poetry),
K.J. Holmes (dance), Sean G. Meehan (snare)

Gallery Walkthrough and Q&A with curator Edwin Torres
Saturday May 2, 2:00 - 3:00 pm

(your) body is a workshop
Saturday, May 16, 10:00AM-1:00PM
Jeanine Durning
RSVP required to annstreetgallery@safe-harbors.org

(your) body is an art talk
Saturday, May 23, 3:00 - 5:00 pm
Renee Gladman and Marcella Durand
Moderated by Edwin Torres

Torres’ annotated curated reading list for our Open Reading Room can be downloaded here.

The Exhibition Guide can be downloaded here.

Press:

Hyperallergic
10 Shows to See in Upstate New York This May
(Download PDF here)

Two Coats of Paint
Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026

Chronogram
Art Review: “(your) body is a porous language” at Ann Street Gallery
(Download PDF here)

Edwin Torres

Guest Curator

<sup>@brainlingo_

The Body In Language: An Anthology
Counterpath Press

Feel Recordings In The Evershift
Wave Books

Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing
Roof Books
a review by Kristin Dykstra</sup>

Edwin Torres is a Nuyorican poet and performance artist known for his innovative, multi-sensory approach to poetry, seeking our possibilities for connection by investigating our entry into language. A multidisciplinary poet rooted in the languages of sight and sound, Torres is interested in the physicality of language, as a permeable territory traveled between us, infinite with mistake and wonder. His performances blend vocal improvisation, physical movement, and audience interaction. Born in the Bronx, Torres is an adjunct poetry professor at Columbia University currently living in Beacon, NY.

Torres has previously performed at Safe Harbors of the Hudson’s Literary Festival and was commissioned to write and perform new work for Ann Street Gallery’s inaugural Artist Researcher in Residence program, From the Ground UP. His piece for the exhibit, “Burial Chant: did you in your life leave any wonder behind”, was recorded and presented in the gallery, and available in the online project archive.

Torres is the author of multiple books of poetry, including “Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing” (Roof Books, awarded an American Book Award), “Xoeteox: the infinite word object” (Wave Books), “Ameriscopia” (University of Arizona), and  “Feel Recordings In The Evershift” (Wave Books) forthcoming this fall. He is also the editor of “The Body In Language: An Anthology” (Counterpath Press). He has been awarded fellowships from NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Arts Mid-Hudson and NYFA among others. He has presented his bodylingo poetics worldwide and locally at the Soon Is Now climate festival among others. His work has been widely anthologized in volumes including “New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives,” “Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement,” and “Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe”.

Torres’ visual poetics have been exhibited at Exit Art, White Box, EFA Gallery in NYC, and a graphic retrospective “Poesís: The Visual Language of Edwin Torres” at the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. His sound recordings include “Sublingual Infinities”, with sound artist Stephen Vitiello, and his own CD “Holy Kid”, which was included in the Whitney Museum’s exhibit “The Last American Century Pt. II”. Torres has collaborated with artists across a variety of media and has taught process-oriented creativity workshops across the nation titled, “Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of The Body”.

Elizabeth Castagna

^{elizabethcastagnafineart.com @elizabeth_movement.art.life}

I make ephemeral, movement drawings in abandoned or temporary spaces. Each piece is made up of a time lapse video, an ephemeral drawing or location photo. The drawings record the language of my body…my internal sensations/thoughts/memories, through accumulated and erased marks which work as a measure of time. The body-led movement drawing I made for this exhibition explores movement drawing through an awareness of 7 layers of my body. Exploring what it’s like to inhabit a layer of myself, what does it tell me? what is stored there? how does it move me? what does this layer know? what changes when I include it in my awareness, does it go missing in my life? what do you want? The drawings help me process and move through my life experiences. The layers I drew through are: bone marrow, bone, ligament/tendon, muscle, fascia, skin, pores. Each layer is drawn with either chalk, charcoal or touch.  

As the drawings are made areas are erased. Drawing while erasing with my body connects me to how the healing process can occur in the body. Experiences have layers too and as sensation falls away, something underlying reveals itself or the energy transforms into something new.

Todd Colby

^{gleefarm.blogspot.com
@toddjcolby}

I refer to the visual art pieces in this show as “word paintings.” In them, I use language that is pared down and immediate, making statements that are simple, refined, and often in-your-face announcements of a state of mind or viewpoint. I try to embody the immediacy of language by pairing it down and condensing the sentences until they pack the best wallop. The economy and directness are directly related to my poetry practice, and when they really work, they plants a little word time bomb in the viewer that breaks through the cascade of language we are surrounded by daily.

Matthew Friday

^{matthewfriday.net
@matthewfriday68}

This work begins with a line that does not know where it is going, and a future imagined from the past.   

The line drifts, pulled and repelled by invisible forces, stitching words together. Each mark is a negotiation, a quiet argument between attraction and resistance, between momentum and interruption. A custom written computer code reads the text, looking for evidence of the past or future and assigns fractal zones of influence. From the text itself, a set of operational parameters are determined that set the boundaries of the drawing. The prophetic 128 words of Karl Marx’s statement become 128 wandering lines; the year of publication, 1848, is converted into the seconds the program runs before it wipes the slate clean and restarts. What emerges is not a composition in the traditional sense, but a field of tendencies, a system that produces drawing as an event in dialogue with the agency of a text, rather than an object.   

This Desire Called Utopia is a series that uses science fiction and utopia texts as a generative springboard for drawing. Envisioning that perfect unattainable land which lies forever on the horizon of the future, these texts are more than just fantasy; they envision worlds yet to come. In a very real sense, the future is already present: utopian narratives are the foundation on which we imagine the possible. Here, utopia is not a destination but a method: a practice of generating difference, of sustaining a space where form is always provisional and the future remains unclosed.  

Renee Gladman

^{reneegladman.com
@prosearchitectures}

These drawings evolve out of a series of moments: the body crossing from one form to another, the I (first-person pronoun) traversing the sentence, space going dark then re-illuminating with non-visible forms, where in roams the relocated I, the I from yesterday, the broken I from this morning. The math opens the point of contact, says I am writing. I am sitting in the world and writing. The math is where fiction breaks open to the essay, which itself has already opened to a fugitive non-knowing. Drawing makes a choreography of the unknown, makes a math for the future.

Charmaine Lee & Gryphon Rue

<sup>charmainelee.com
@charmainelee

gryphonrue.com
@4n_objx</sup>

This collaborative audio piece explores a sonic terrain of language reimagined as pure sound. The recording is taken from a live performance and was mixed exclusively for this exhibition. Charmaine Lee’s reconstructed vocality meets Gryphon Rue’s hybrid of natural and synthetic textures, generating an inter-dimensional space of altered meaning and new sonic signification. 

Charmaine Lee uses the voice, feedback, and live processing. Lee’s practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation.

Gryphon Rue’s visual and sonic works weave disparate aesthetic languages into unexpected forms. Rue combines found and fabricated materials, the natural and the synthetic, and high and low fidelity, engaging a tactile, improvisational approach to making.

Shanzhai Lyric

^{shanzhailyric.info
@shanzhai_lyric}

Incomplete Poem (heap) is a selection from Shanzhai Lyric’s roving archive of over 400 found poetry garments, drawing inspiration from the experimental English of "shanzhai" (counterfeit) T-shirts made in China. The Shanzhai Lyric project examines how mimicry, hybridity, and permutation reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Each shirt in the archive blurs individual authorship through copy, collaboration, theft, creative mistranslation, and error.

Often the archive is displayed in custom-built reading apparatuses designed to encourage reading and reflection upon the garments as documents. These reading apparatuses reference places where both text and textile are found—laundrylines, runways, newspapers, billboards, landfills, and heaps. At Ann Street Gallery, the piece looks to the form of the heap, inspired by the idiom of unofficial street markets where passerbys are encouraged to dig through piles of goods. Here, we hang a microphone over the heap of shirts so they may speak their collective chance poem.

Erika Mahr

^{erikamahr.com
@erika_mahr}

My practice examines the coexistence and tension between our analytical and emotive experiences of the world through minimal form, process, and ephemeral surfaces. I’m driven by an ongoing negotiation between control and vulnerability, structure and instability, and the desire to make internal experience legible. Grounded in drawing, acts of mediation reduce and repeat form to locate where the ephemeral and the concrete intersect, blur, and generate tension. Actions of wiping, sanding, folding, marking, and cutting transform material and form into something familiar, translating the internal lived experience into a shared visual language.  

The works in the Erasures series reflect moments of immense change, loss of self, and reinvention, mirroring the atemporal qualities of memory and early motherhood. Chalkboard drawings built up and broken down through cycles of drawing, sanding, washing, and reworking accumulate marks, residue, and traces of gesture, creating dense atmospheric fields that hover between surface and depth. Thin white lines cut through this haze, functioning as brief moments of clarity.

The drawings oscillate between compression and expansion, opacity and openness. This push and pull draws the viewer into an unstable spatial relationship with the work, alternately inviting immersion and enforcing distance, so that looking becomes an active negotiation between clarity and obscurity, presence and disappearance.

Tamalyn Miller

^{tamalynmiller.com
tamalynmiller.bandcamp.com @tamalynmiller}

Words are immaterial, yet they have a primal capacity to conjure, to call into existence. I play with this paradox, creating objects, installations and performances that arise from and inform numinous original texts. Drawing upon diverse cultural sources and periods, I blend residues of ancient systems with contemporary perspectives and forms. Through observation and research, often with a focus on the natural world, I distill complex phenomena into otherworldly texts, objects, and music that suggest recovered artifacts or rites charged with mysterious powers and functions. My work hovers at junctures: the threshold that separates a medicinal dose from a lethal one, for example, or the tenuous margin between the material and the immaterial.

Gabriela Salazar

^{gabrielasalazar.com
@belugasalazar}

My work examines the modes and measures of knowledge that are transmitted, visibly and invisibly, via structure and stuff. I approach the built and found environment, my personal history, and material, as frameworks for site‑responsive installations, drawings, and sculpture that engage the relational and associative possibilities inherent in medium, architecture, the body, selfhood, and place. Throughout runs a fascination with the phenomenology of site; the ways architecture is (mis)repurposed towards contemporary needs and uses; rule-making (and bending) as a strategy for uncovering idealizations and uncertainty in experience and expectations; and the large-and-small consequences of intentionality, ambition, limit, and failure.

Compendium (1) is the first in a series of sculptural drawings that take elements from other works (both three and two-dimensional) for its shapes and forms. I create them as a sort of time-keeping, journaling, and notebook in sculptural form. Hanging from the ceiling, the individual parts rotate, making the composition ever-shifting. Like an arrow pointing Earthward, a found plumb bob anchors each work just above the floor, gravity helping to hold the moments and memories of the work in suspension.

Sasha Stiles

^{sashastiles.com
@sashastiles}

Heart Mantras is a poem with a pulse: a generative language system that continually writes and rewrites itself in real time. The work emerges from Stiles’s ongoing exploration of poetic intelligence— the braiding together of emotion and algorithm to make meaning — as a lens through which to consider what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

Using her poem Heart Mantra as a source text, the work unfolds through a field of infinite variations composed by her alter ego, Technelegy, a synthetic poet mentored by Stiles since 2018 as a critical engagement with AI. A new verse emerges every four minutes; each iteration refracts, distorts, and augments the original, rendering legible the impact of generative systems on language, memory, and the conditions of authorship.

Both performance and manuscript, Heart Mantras inhabits a shifting landscape where human relationships are increasingly mediated by complex networks, and dataset, prompt, and digital infrastructure become poetic instruments of perception. Here, language operates as loop and lifeline: an interface that connects and carries us, even as it evolves and rewrites us.

The work reflects how Stiles’s practice evolves from and expands upon literary traditions and canonical text-based art, invoking a hybrid voice shaped by our techno-cultural environs. Unfolding slowly and more deeply with time, Heart Mantras reimagines algorithm not as automation, but as attention and mantra: a ritual meditation that invites us to become more poetic about our fast-advancing technologies, and to consider how they might open new realms of imagination and understanding.

Edwin Torres

Guest Curator

^@brainlingo_

I’m interested in how to keep up with an evolutionary continuum out of our control, by rearranging our entry points. The expansion of poetry’s dialogue between messenger and receiver is a continual shift for me, to discover new realms, new interpretations, that meet the reader where they are not where they need to be. The question of movement becoming the story is a release into the possible.

Self Poet is a meeting between transformations, where identity’s mirror is repetition. My Slippage series meet the verticality of the visitor, where text slips behind text to echo the detritus of the alternate say.

Both string totems are recent forms I’ve been exploring, integrating physical space into the reader’s approach of a poem. Further inspired by typographic negative spaces and Ancient Mayan alphabets that used letters as totems placed over each other to create sigils considered to have magical power.

The first totem Mi Casa is about meeting earth’s language where it wants to root into the weight of weightlessness, where body becomes casa becoming lengua.  The second totem Sanctuary is about meeting the page where it wants to fly from the book, looking for ground, where we enter to pass through the poem, where under becomes a noun for sanctuary, to seek refuge in falling together.

All are elements of poetry-making for me. How dimensions of language are the portals we invent, to absorb selves we’ve yet to hear.

Yara Travieso

^{yaratravieso.com
@yaratravieso}

My work is rooted in the mad, the absurd, and the sacred, embracing a multitude of terrains for embodied explorations that invite deep listening, surrender, and interconnection. I grew up in the triangle of political turmoil, machismo, and media spectacle of Cuba, Venezuela, and the U.S.. Living between endless systems of abusive power and land subjugation, I practice explosive bouts of liberation in my daily movement practice and quiet listening in my video and film practice. Drawing from Caribbean matrilineal sensibilities, my practice surrenders to impossibilities, spirituality, spectacle, absurdity, myth, melodrama, gossip, rage, humor, ritual, & land. My performance practice has been an embodied vehicle for survival within violent systems, and has evolved into a call towards our inextricable bond with each other, and all that is alive. My film practice fosters a terrain of embodied “story-listening,” v.s. an imposed “story-telling”, inviting mine, my collaborator’s, & our viewer’s sensibilities to uncover the invisible truths stored in our bodies, our histories, & our radical futures. In this way, the camera becomes an external consciousness, intensifying the sense of being present for all those it captures, while also shouldering the burden of our wounds, fears & truths; The camera says what systems of power deny us, stating unequivocally: “I feel what you feel”...

Cecilia Vicuña

^{ceciliavicuna.com
@ceciliavicuna}

Visual poems, the works in Vicuña’s PALABRARmas series are carefully attuned to the power of language. Many of these works incorporate wordplay, and throughout her practice, Vicuña treats words as embodied entities whose forms can be parsed to reveal subliminal meanings across a variety of languages. For the series title, Vicuña has invented the word “palabrarmas,” a fusion of “palabra” (Spanish for “word”) and “armas” (“weapon”). At the same time, “palabrarmas” also suggests an even wider range of meanings, bearing similarities, for instance, to a portmanteau of the verb “apalabrar” (“to agree on”), and the word “más” (more). Just as Vicuña emphasizes the capacity of words to cause violence and destruction, so she also suggests that they can be potent tools of reconciliation and understanding. The print included in this exhibition, Eman si pasión [Emancipation / Participation] again looks to language to consider notions of freedom and engagement as she extracts from both “emancipacion” and “participacion” (Spanish for “emancipation” and “participation”) the Spanish words “si” (“yes”) and “pasion” (“passion”).

Millicent Young

^{millicentyoung.com
@millicent.young}

These works belong to 3 different series made over the past 10 years. Each is a series of rectilinear flat or frontal yet dimensional works originally referencing pages or architectural features such as walls, windows, niches, and doorways. The forms are a means to hold what is at edge of my grasp.   

Language is one of the things these works probe. What is language? What does it record? What happens when words are split from the substance of their meaning? When they become marks holding place for something no longer known, where does the story go? What is the absence of language?  

The marks I make are an asemic script of an unknown language I have been working with for decades, often combining the script with marks that are counting something.  
The works also bear the marks of a telluric language that remembers liquidity, substrates, and the cosmos. And, in the case of Aleppo, of war.  

These works care about the way things are held. I refer to what holds the plaster tableaux in the Inaudible and In Silence series as bezels. A term borrowed from jewelry making, a bezel is a setting that holds the stone.    

Zina Zinchenko

^{just2befree.wixsite.com/body-knows
@body_knows_}

Body Knows is a somatic movement method focused on nervous system regulation, fascia awareness, breath, and intuitive movement developed by movement artist, performer, and somatic practitioner, Zina Zinchenko. Zinchenko, in conversation with curator Edwin Torres, has selected 18 short videos from hundreds of somatic trauma informed movement videos available on her social media account @body_knows_.

The videos loop on five screens in the exhibition, inviting the viewer to not only watch, but to move, to feel—to notice their own posture, breath, and physical sensations while standing in the space—and to explore the movements demonstrated by Zinchenko with their own bodies.

Zinchenko’s work emphasizes the body as a site of memory, adaptation, and resilience, where simple physical actions influence the nervous system. With a background in contemporary dance, immersive theatre, and somatic movement education, her work explores how psychological and emotional experiences are expressed through the physical body.

The videos are based on the idea that the body holds tension, experience, and emotional patterns—but it also holds the ability to regulate, adapt, and heal. Through slow, repetitive movements such as shifting weight, circling joints, softening the jaw, moving the spine, and breathing, the videos explore how small physical actions can change internal states.

The work suggests that change does not always begin with thinking.

Sometimes, change begins by noticing the body.