When the Sun Loses Its Light
Sep 10 - Oct 22, 2022
Curated by Jeff Poe
Los Angeles, CA, August 2022—Blum & Poe is pleased to present When the Sun Loses Its Light, with work by Michelle Blade, Ian Collings, Shanique Emelife, Claudia Keep, Karyn Lyons,
and Lauren Satlowski.
Christmas 1980. I was back from college. It’s me and my brother Greg. Or Gregory to everyone else. I was playing River on the piano, and we were doing our best Joni. Warbling through the
high notes neither of us could come close to hitting. Laughing. There’s a polaroid around here somewhere I remember that Ma took. Found it! Here it is. Loved that night. Has always stayed
with me.
I’m gonna get to the point here—some months ago, an eighty-seven-year-old Canadian man was hospitalized after a bad fall. While undergoing a test to check the electrical activity in his
brain, he suffered a heart attack. Because the man had a do-not-resuscitate order, the doctors let him pass away as the EEG recorded his thoughts. And what his brain activity scientifically showed is something that has been conjecture forever: our life does flash before us when we die. In the minute before and after his death, the EEG scan read that he fell into a dream state that revealed his brain replaying memories from the span of his life.
I’m taking the hopeful position that these intimate scenes floating through at the end are the gentle ones, the calm ones—the ones that, at the time, are seemingly small but get dropped and locked in that emotional vault right there in our chests, then travel up and forever get held tight. They are alive. They last.
With that in mind, here's a few moments, taken and made real for us. Some delicate paintings on wood riffing off photos that Claudia shot on her phone while wandering or just being. Karyn’s grandly quiet moments of her youth. Ah, youth! Shanique’s family and friends from
those snapshots that we hold dear. Michelle’s daughters lovingly rendered now almost like a secret whisper and reminder of what is, now was. Lauren catching the last lights of an LA day, radiant and abstract. And Ian, reminding us that we have this vessel that keeps it all inside, ours alone really, and that’s OK.
When Greg passed, he was in his bed tucked in and smiling. I'm hoping he had just been in his bedroom at fourteen on a rainy February night, candles, Tapestry on the record player and
Hilary braiding his long brown hair; then Mt. Baldy on a summer morning with the sun tossing off kaleidoscopic rays through the trees; Lance on Fire Island in the late afternoon reading him passages from Lolita; Thanksgiving 1974 in the wood paneled dining room on Weyburn, the last time we were all there together...
—Jeff Poe