Art is the Place I Come Back To Remember

Hello to you. First one, I want to give you my appreciation for your attention, as you read the following. It's still something I'm sensitive around talking and bringing a voice to, primarily because I haven't heard a lot of people talk about it in a way that felt true within my body.

As an Artist, it is part of my process, some would even say duty, to share a voice on it.

Sometimes, there are days where I spiral, unknowingly touching something that hasn't been felt in years. I see the pattern. My mind racing. My body starting to feel a bit more distant to me. The world I had just created for myself seemingly untouchable. This, at least for me, is why somatic is so important, especially as an artist, it gives you a reference point, a secret language for yourself, when unprocessed trauma starts to poke its head into the surface of my reality, and just like the tower card, things start to fall apart.

I've had enough moments to realize not to be afraid of it. Not to brace my whole body up against an impending doom, but to trust it. To trust whatever is moving through at that moment, no matter how ugly, unsanitized, with respect for my process.

This for me, is why we need to awaken the inner artist within everyone. Not for the pretty picture, but for the empowering it offers our humanity, to not see our own process as something ugly, or worthless, but to value it uniquely as something that feeds into the art.

My process these days, has been this gentle unveiling of all the ways I forget I'm brown.

The subtle letting go of it, any time I'm around primarily white friends. No matter how kind, generous, or forgiving they are. There is this piece by piece way, that parts of me feel like they start leaving me, to formulate a new personality, to fit in.

Toning down my voice.

Shape shifting for safety.

Prioritizing their experiences.

Some of you might be thinking, but why Jessenia? Just stop it?

I agree with you. Which is why for the last 5 years, spirituality gave me an anchor. The modern day spirituality that shoots away this process to point to the outcome instead. The "where it's better to be".

Instead, what's been more 'real' for me is, somehow, enjoying the fullness of the process.

Like taking the venom, for the antidote.

As to fully be present in it, feel it, gain a relationship with it, instead of this ugly dirty brown thing I need to 'deal with'.

For many brown people, these are the effects of racism, both internal and external that is our own responsibility to process. Never the 'white' people.

It's our own mechanisms for survival.

Our own way of blending in, not being seen, as to just get by the day to survive.

As someone who is 'done' just 'surviving' this is the gentleness in which I meet myself.

Not from the spiritual materialism of wanting to conquer another level of the human spirit.

Not from the puritanical sense of wanting to be pure.

Not from the perfectionism in which we want to treat the human animal.

But from a mastery of artistry, that is being human. The mastery of, being fully present. Not having power over, but being in power WITH what is moving through me.

Opening the lens of curiosity, to peer into my own world, and see… oh my, where has a piece of me gone? From survival instincts that had been adopted from my immigrant parents, my dad who had to undergo a huge level of racism in the United States, that taught him it's better to not be human and be ignored, than it was to help or stand by idly existing. Because standing, meant police thinking he was suspicious. Which meant children projecting their parents insecurities onto him for looking 'other'. For needing to make someone the boogeyman, pointing to him, and choosing him out of all people because he just looked different.

Those differences, is why I make art.

It's my rebirth, for me, Jessenia Nauta, but also, the ongoing inquiry of, what would come to be? If these pieces was given the solid attention they needed growing up?

What would emerge? If I loved them? What would come out the other end? When I listened to the silence that lived inside them?

My art, isn't about looking pretty, because God has already made perfectly everything that there already is. Even the racism.

My art, is a journey of curiosity. Of what if's. That feed my spirit daily, uplifts the voices that were pushed away, and an ongoing question of…. What …Who would show up in my place? When I gave the parts that were told to go away? A place to stand?