February 13 - March 5, 2017

“Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.” Jared Sexton

The best kind of secret operates in plain sight. The best kind of scar is the skin itself. The best kind of human is the inhuman.

The Nat Turner Project is happy to announce a duo show by sidony o’neal and manuel arturo abreau. Using text and ephemera, the artists interrogate the ontological and political investment in claiming continuity between mainland and diaspora, between slavery and its afterlife. How does one ground oneself along the continuum between healing and assimilation? Why is it so difficult to refuse to refuse?

sidony o'neal is a writer and artist based in Portland, OR. In addition to solo work, they have performed as a member of performance projects DEAD THOROUGHBRED and DELICTO. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, BATHHOUSE, SPOOK magazine, FUTURE CONCRETE, Women & Performance, and VARVVARV. They are the translator of Prognosis: Descarga Poetica Decolonial (Quilomboarte 2014) and author of f a c e b o w l (THE MINI CHAPBOOK PRESS 2013). sidony has held a Literary In(ter)ventions residency at the Banff Centre (Canada), a Creative Exchange Lab Residency with PICA (US), and a residency at Arteles Center (Finland). They are an artist in residence in the Synth Library at S1 gallery (Portland).

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. Currently living and making in a garage in Southeast Portland, they work in text, ephemeral sculpture, photography, and whatever is at hand.

i love mani

by maximiliano

i love mani, manuel arturo abreu. one of my favorite portland poets, curators, and artists mani wears many hats and does many things. nat turner project has host mani in several projects and they have also hosted nat turner project with their project homeschool. i can't even remember how i first met mani, i think it was through another NTP artist, aruni dharmakirthi, mani shows up and has a great smile and sense of humor. and mani was way about cardi b before she became global, with their seminal poem if i could vote, i’d vote for cardi b.

for the opening and closing of their show with sidony o’neal they read poetry from their book transtrender and mani and sidony gave an amazing artist talk.

the immaterial, language, and humor, but with a raw sincerity ...

 Markings

by Melanie Stevens

Human beings cannot survive the memory of our injuries.  The puncturing of flesh giving way to blood and bone; the mind-numbing pain of something sharp and hard crashing against you; the feeling of losing complete control of your body as someone or something else exerts the control of theirs against yours.

Our memories cannot sustain clarity; not for daily existence.

What we remember, always, are the scars.  Those scars become proof and the degree to which they heal/fade are the living archives of those memories.  

Memories of memories of memories.

And those scars?  They mark us, for the world to see, for us to see ourselves.  

But where does the scarring end and the healing begin? Who gets to decide what that looks like? Who gets to decide if healing ever existed?

Memories of memories of memories.

No one is unmarked.  

sidony o’neal’s sharp, quick oscillations between language, sculpture and texture cut to the bone in ways that defy resistance.  Their ephemeral interventions flirt with humor and mourning, oftentimes in the same breath.

An old, faded Ebony Magazine opened to an advertisement of a young Black boy smiling, whispering of a time that, perhaps, never quite was, but nevertheless feels like something that has slipped away.  A cascading stretch of draped cotton, stained with something unknowable and broken by interwoven and stitched pieces of black vinyl. A mason jar of pennies, soaking in vinegar, evoking both a preciousness and a precarity.  A small room, off to the side, empty but for a small night light shaped like a chicken drumstick and large vinyl text on the wall:

your white friends will let you down

and they certainly did.

Memories of memories of memories.