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Second Sight
Collection "C'est Mon Dada" #214
The work in Second Sight repurposes facsimiles of so-called famous / canonical manuscripts to create masks in what is both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering the manuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting and content) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms the manuscripts into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask, being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costume and for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonial exoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work of Picasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is the blind gesture forward, concretizing the manuscripts via cutting and the addition of banal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which may reveal.
The work in Second Sight repurposes facsimiles of so-called famous / canonical manuscripts to create masks in what is both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering the manuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting and content) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms the manuscripts into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask, being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costume and for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonial exoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work of Picasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is the blind gesture forward, concretizing the manuscripts via cutting and the addition of banal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which may reveal.
40 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2025
About the author
Sacha Archer
17 books10 followersSacha Archer is a Canadian writer and concrete poet. His most recent book is Second Sight published by Redfox Press. Some of Archer’s other publications include Havana Syndrome (The Blasted Tree), Sweet Sixteen (Zimzalla), cellsea (Timglaset), Empty Building (Penteract Press), Mother’s Milk (Timglaset), which was included on CBC’s best poetry books of 2020 list, Perverse Density (above/ground press) and In Remembrance of Lost Children (Paper View Books). He was a judge for the Hamilton Literary Awards for numerous years and is currently a judge for Grain Magazine’s hybrid/experimental writing contest.
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