Meticulously staged domestic interior featuring multiple figures of varying ages engaged in different activities—a child at a piano, figures on a staircase, and others throughout a cream-colored room with period furnishings, framed artworks, and a patterned rug, rendered in saturated color photography with theatrical composition and narrative complexity.

Metaverse

Julie Blackmon

10/7/2022 – 1/6/2023

Metaverse brings together twelve new photographs by Julie Blackmon, made in 2021 and 2022 in and around her hometown of Springfield, Missouri. As always, her cast is drawn from her large extended family of nieces, nephews and neighbors, and each scene is staged with the care of a painting.

The title is a sly one: there isn’t a screen in sight. In the title work, children spread through an old house, climbing the banister, crouching on the stairs, bent over the piano, each lost in a world of their own making. Blackmon’s metaverse is the one children have always built for themselves, out of whatever is at hand.

Four of the photographs were made on the Finley River, south of Springfield. Flatboat shows a raft of sunbathers, Night Swim swimmers in white floating around a red canoe, and Smoke a platform drifting through haze. In Paddleboard, a pregnant woman poles a board stacked with coolers while a toddler rides up front. It’s a contemporary recasting of George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Elsewhere, masked kids crowd a porch at Halloween (Masks), two children in chicken suits stand stiffly beside a piano (Chicken Littles), and a van unloads a Costco haul of vodka, snacks and a giant teddy bear in a parking lot (Costco). For the exhibition, the van itself was driven into the gallery and restocked from the photograph’s shopping list.

The humor is easy to see, but there’s unease underneath it. Blackmon’s pictures move between nostalgia and satire, between the freedom of childhood and the anxieties of the adults just outside the frame.

Exhibition Images ()

  • A figure in a black sleeveless top performs an acrobatic pose atop a wooden stool with three legs, balancing while holding black vinyl records with gold centers in each hand. The minimalist gallery setting features white walls, polished concrete flooring, and industrial ceiling with exposed beams. On the left wall, a fashion photograph shows a woman wearing a mustard-yellow coat.
  • A young girl in a mustard-yellow coat with red and gold trim stands against a white background, wearing black slip-on shoes and carrying a red shoulder bag. Gray text overlays the right side of the image.
  • Gallery wall installation featuring a life-size photograph of a young woman in a mustard-colored coat with a red bag standing against a white wall, paired with an framed photograph showing the same figure in a yellow dress standing in a grassy yard. Gray text displaying a poem by Jim Howard is positioned between the two images.
Meticulously staged domestic interior featuring multiple figures of varying ages engaged in different activities—a child at a piano, figures on a staircase, and others throughout a cream-colored room with period furnishings, framed artworks, and a patterned rug, rendered in saturated color photography with theatrical composition and narrative complexity.

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