I wrote this piece as a response to my college prep experience at De La Salle, at our annual fundraiser. “Dreams are images our mind creates, but we wonder if they are valid.”
After being asked to help plan and coordinate Portland's March for Our Lives with other great student leaders, I wrote this piece as a letter to our future children, "who will not have to March For their Lives."
'Beauty is more than skin deep.' When your skin does not reflect the status quo, finding your sense of beauty is a constant fight for personal acceptance-- a constant practice of restorative justice.
+Portland Winter Lights Festival
unmasced is an interactive installation to spark a conversation about how people see/accept notions of gender norms, and gender associated behavior. unmasced interrogates what it means to be: a "man" or a "woman."
The collaborative installation created with the Open Signal and the digital brand and product innovation company Instrument, for the Portland Winter Lights Festival.
a true passion project, Brown Boy Feelings lent time, space and dialogue to discuss the pressures boys of color face, in pursuit of being a 'man.'
http://pica.org/event/brown-boy-feelings/
+Intersect Fest, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Space is integral to our understanding of self: the way we feel, are seen, perceived and physically fit into a space are all informed by history, time and geography. As a Portland native, who has seen the displacement of entire communities of color in North and Northeast Portland it has been a true hope and intention of mine to one time see and be apart of the cultural liveliness that once was. I wanted to speak to the gentrification of the Albina neighborhood and provide what it would look like if blacks took back that space.
The background imagery are structures and institutions that are historically white spaces: Harvard University, Columbia University, Georgetown University, and the United States Capitol Building; as well as neighborhoods in Portland that have been gentrified or historically white: the Pearl, the Albina neighborhood, Downtown Portland and the Mississippi District. Spurred on by the inspiration of the Portland Art Museum’s, Constructing Identity exhibition, I collected photographs of artists from Kara Walker to Archie Smith. This photographs of their art are intermixed with visuals of black faces: friends and family. I have drawn inspiration and insights from these professional artists, companions and the experimental work of Miles Davis, whose song Bitches Brew, is set in the background, serving as a symbolic recolonization of jazz and rock music from its historic black roots.
Visuals are fundamental means to articulating thought. Audio augments these visuals in constructing these realities. Objects bring this abstraction into the physicality of the world.
installation
+on the ground: photographs, toys, symbols and memories in front of video
+background music: Bitches Brew, Miles Davis
in a silent film created by two close collaborators, the filmmakers take on abstraction, silence and emotion with a creative lens.
I stare so deep
Who are you?
Who am I?
Can you tell me?
I dream in and out
Subconscious racked with things
I never wanted
love, hurt and happiness
Make out to me the things they can't see
Breathe, breathe, hope to dream
Dream to be and to be is all I dream
Beat this life, one to two, two to three,
Three and four, love me blinded
Whole and known
You find your soul, the things I will never know
Free the life
Higher and higher we go until the sky reaches infinity
Infinite as 7.
She dragged on,
limped strides,
banded wrists,
told stories of
demented times
where heroes lacked
identity,
turned blind to her needs
lied truths that
could have been
avoided with compassion
lended hands that
served like bandaids
to wounds so tarnished
her soul bled cries of
joy,
wrote signs with broken fingers,
to catch the attention
I never could grant her,
submerged waters
washed clean the
stigmas of how
we could never give her a chance,
a sister that mothered
truth and moral
and people that fostered
greed and deception,
Forever she may be lost
From all that could come
We ran
through the orchard
you
slipped,
knee scraped,
but the reality was the
disappearance
of your
love
Gone
How I fell
We became
the trees that swang
until the disappearance
became reappearance
as a reflection
We
r
a
n
What lies behind that smile?
The trapped spirit of one wishing to live?
Is it the angel of happiness? Her prey being the joy of pleasing her young
Is it the nymph of laughter?
Filling like a balloon of inhibitions and insecurities of oneself.
Teething like the infant it is.
Behind those eyes lie love
a love that is waiting to bloom,
waiting to grow and thrive
Behind that smile is a person waiting to be freed of a life long gone
Behind that glow is the possibility of love.
I cry out
In a dream,
Trapped among
Double face
Masked creatures
With expressions
Soaked in effervescent
virtues
tainted deeply
my soul
destroyed from people who
meant love
yet such happiness is still,
Without movement,
Dormant as if stalled
In a world full of joy,
I find security in the negativity
That paints pictures of lies
Framed with unlawful propaganda,
I asked to be saved from this reality
yet my heroes are my captors,
trapping me here so I may live
believing what I am told,
My thoughts are drowned
In seas of my own tears,
I remain as a fragment of a reality
twistedly, sweet
I become its fellow companion,
May we never escape
I shall have some sort of love
We sat in solace,
kissed with bitter lips,
consumed breaths ,
oceans wide,
leaping thighs ran cross avenues
spilt through woods of roads
engulfed with deathly needle
and yet that is you,
a crippled mind, lost in a body you’ve known eternity,
plagued with unkindly spirits,
eating away at all that is left,
from what you knew as true,
inevitable, its demise is impossible,
you try to rid it,
find comfort in poisons listed ‘help’
but you can not help what you can not rid yourself,
I could not judge i was more guilty than you,
We knew but could not stop
what was meant to be
taken,
gone,
And disappeared,
they came running to me,
whispered so sweet,
it felt a treat,
to for once know me.
passed down,
these figures,
knew unlocked secrets,
knew names and forsake nothing,
demanded me to be uncompared,
delivered a power so rich,
consumed,
they floated,
so human and godly,
they resembled everything i knew to be bad,
and in that i knew they were my god,
my black bringers,
--awake.
a flow of consciousness,
disrupts my happiness
and i sit pretending that this is normal
my place in this world so singular
no other knows it
wondering what gave me the right to exist
To live and be in such tranquility,
In a time of such hostility
lost, unknowing and yet I am known,
they all see me but can not feel me
streaming blindly, each thought devouring my psyche
unsettled and continually pondering,
i am losing
wondering, pondering, questioning and question,
where is where?
and within here is nowhere.
In her eyes,
She died that night.
-----
Surrounded and surmounted,
Suffocated and succumbed,
So diligently, she covered her nightly skin,
Every freckle like a star in the sky
And every bruise, a constellation.
Configurations of dark circle,
Enclosed her eyes.
And roses peered out of her fingertips,
Thorns forged from years of clipping and cultivation.
And leaves crowned her head,
With a tilted chin,
Heightened walk and
Hypnotic swaying,
Her body became a willow,
The willow that holds her son,
From rope built by men.
The willow that delivered
Young women, that saw their bodies,
As night skies, ashamed to be forever bleak,
The willow that uplifted the prophets and
Rooted the angels.
And with an unwavering slash,
Her sons, daughters, prophets and angels,
Cut every knitting of her biblically caressed hide,
Smoked every bee that constructed the hive within her heart
Captured every mystical butterfly cocooning in her ribcage
Sawed off each branch that connected every soul.
The sacrificial black sheep,
Her herd deserted her and the shepherd
Released her.
-----
In her mind,
We survived that morning.
You came in and the world stopped
My eyes neared end
My heart stopped and I looked so deep into you
I lost it within you
I gave it to you
And you bore me every love that could feel this heart
Every smile so kindred
A mess I stare back and see that you free me from me
You unleash the pieces that fragment, contract and
Stargaze
Display every safety and outshine every hope,
The dream that never made it through
I learn from you
You teach and speak
Captivated. Entirely we must grow
Grow in this
Never allow it to stagnate
To fester. But to build,
Peer out into this world
Blossom and open its mouth wide to softly take it all in
To bear something new
Continue a cycle
A metamorphosis
Each cocoon a lesson
Every butterfly
A new me
I have come to love,
Me.
taken,
gone,
And disappeared,
they came running to me,
whispered so sweet,
it felt a treat,
to for once know me.
passed down,
these figures,
knew unlocked secrets,
knew names and forsake nothing,
demanded me to be uncompared,
delivered a power so rich,
consumed,
they floated,
so human and godly,
they resembled everything i knew to be bad,
and in that i knew they were my god,
my black bringers,
--awake.
Face me.
A reflection and mirror blend so well
A face reminds me of me.
But how do we see ourselves?
Do we search in light of what we are told,
Fat, ugly, gay, stupid, black, dirty, poor.
Are our eyes truly ours or the instruments
Of social influence?
Can we truly look into a reflection and Turn from me.
Know it to be us. Can you see?
How do I know its me. Your vision is no longer with eyes wide
What if I lie so where far over there Rather eyes turned,
And nowhere in between? Eyes alive,
Does this reflection display me a truth, Moving and fresh
Or rather gratify me a lie? Harboring no bias or influence
What do we know? To the world in front,
Are we thinking? Are our thoughts ours or Freeing itself of any constraint to order
The accumulation of others, Disrupting the structure
Made manifest in our lives? Searching and not looking
Seeking and not seeing
How powerful the world behind us?
With shadows and lessons and experiences
A past, no pass.
A past, so clear
A future open to us all
One my eyes can see.
Sonu Okan