Children play with balls on a stark white concrete wall dividing an upper and lower level against a clear blue sky. A shirtless boy stands on top of the wall watching, while below, two children toss colorful balls upward, their shadows cast sharply against the pale surface. Beach equipment and a white structure are visible at the top edge of the composition.

Julie Blackmon

Moonball, 2025

archival pigment print

Available in 26” x 33.5” (edition of 10), 36” x 47” (edition of 10), 44 x 57.66” (edition of 10)

Before we were born, we were mysterious planets circled by the future. Then we were set on orbits of our own, looking for a center, finding it, losing it, in those long days of our short childhoods, experimenting in the open space between should and could, keeping as much of ourselves up in the air as possible. We didn’t know yet about the despair of dying stars, the three-body problem, that there’s a silence around everything space ever does. If someone learned about our sun being a big bomb that would supernova everything to ash someday, we worried briefly, until that moment burned away and something rose up from it, as if time had wings and we leapt onto its back toward everything that came next. We owned the color of afternoon sky, knew the shapes a day might take, beyond cautioning eyes or voices, a spiral of small thrills made from nothing but what we could carry or spill or kick down the street or fling or fall from or brush against, leaving safety to learn what it meant exactly as we’d been told not to: by accident. How we adored an arcing escape from gravity and grounding, that breathless peak before the fall back to earth, home, evening settling over us all. - Jim Howard

inquire

More by Julie Blackmon (View All)