Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB's series of short studio tours with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.

April's guest is Mita Mahato, a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism.

Her new book Arctic Play is published by The 3rd Thing, and her poetry comix have appeared in places including PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades.

In her talk, Mahato will share insight into how place-making inspires the hybrid poetics in Arctic Play and its companion activity book "TROPSSAP" which will be featured in the upcoming SFCB gallery exhibition Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined, April 19-June 15, 2025.

You can find out more at her website, mitamahato.com

Please visit our Vimeo page to see our past tours, previously known as Shelter in Studio.

Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.