The Brooklyn Rail

In Blue Sun, Genesis Báez plays with maternal female figures in and beyond domestic spaces, delivering a depth of place, relation, and navigation. After showing some of these images in collaborative exhibits—with Sofía Gallisá Muriente (San Juan, 2023) and with Jenny Calivas (New York, 2022)—the book assembles the artist’s ongoing experimentation with the sensorial possibilities of her practice. The Massachusetts-born teaching artist, who grew up between Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, now lives in Brooklyn. The photographs prod at the role of kinship, caretaking, and the passing of messages, when in her own life, talk of Puerto Rico often came from the kitchen table in New England. “Drawing from her own family, Báez makes artworks that illustrate Puerto Rico’s matriarchal kinship system,” Hilda Lloréns reflects at the end of the book. The captions of images in the back of the book read like poetic verses offering a guiding conduit to experience. The book employs fragmentation of light and repetition of gestures to illustrate how caretaking and ritual between family members can point to growing intimacy and wonder in preserving intergenerational memory.

In an early image, Hear the Time Go By (2018), Báez presents a wide shot of a bed. A billowing curtain surrounds the bed, aghast by a gust of wind from the open window. While a bed recalls the bliss of rest, the strong breeze moving the sheets and fabric panels evokes disquietude. Here, the visuals of sound and movement conjure the ephemeral. The sublime rustling of curtains in the absence of a human animates the slipperiness of time—curtains become carriers of echoes, of slowness—observed through the break of the fabric. Several works are described as “negative buried in earth:” The Side of The House, and Almond Tree (As a Galaxy) (2013–14), Negative buried in earth (2013–14), Montaña Santa Elena (As an Ocean) (2012–13), and Negative buried in earth (2012–13). With these, she deliberately engages the earth in her process: Báez buried negatives behind her family’s yard and came back to resurrect them later. From this process, the images became markedly blue, buoyant with abstract color and lines.

Báez renews the mundane, weaving seemingly disparate materials and gestures: gossip around the table, the whisper from one ear to another, the braiding of hair, caretaking for the land, a body’s immersion into water, a red hand-held mirror hung upside down marked by fingerprints; the cavern of a chipped tiled floor, shells scattered amongst the dirt, a bowl of water. Energy pulsates from these quotidian objects, archival family images with the patinas of prints corroded by time, and crevices, evoking impermanence as sites of futurity and connection.

Images like Earth to Sky (2021) directly summon a connection between the dimensions by way of the clouded reflection of the sky on the water. The rosy, muddled-sanguine glow of the sky creates a call and response between the sky and water, with the photograph revealing the portals between. In this image, Báez refuses the dualism of sea and land mass, inviting the viewer to dwell in the terrain of in-between. Báez not only meditates on her familial lineage through landscape—water, sky, clouds—but she engages the elements to enact themselves upon her work. Her work draws on the environment, memory, storytelling traditions, and new theories of creating and experiencing images.

In Báez’s The Sound of a Circle (2018), two young women sit at a long dining table with their faces drawn toward each other. One is whispering into the other’s ear, covering her mouth with her hand, as if to protect her words. They are classically beautiful, turning heliotropic, anointed by the light that comes in from presumably the outside lighting. It is a delicate and yet unyielding image, teeming with mystery and play. The sequence delivers a sense that Báez’s rumor is literally carried from the table through the elements, along with the array of shadows and tones. Báez, putting experimentation, movement, and intimacy at the center of her practice, draws out interiority as rituals of daily life. There’s a magical element to her palette. Sun-lit rooms and lush banana groves emphasize both a beautiful wildness and enchantment. In Portal (2019), Báez keeps at bay romanticizing these enactments—as Lloréns points out, the photo’s caption tells us that the local government redeveloped the banana grove in 2021. In these ways, the book animates gestures and rituals of intergenerational caretaking as sites of becoming, as well as grieving. In the end, holding another line with her mother—the watering hose connecting the two a few yards apart—Báez conjures the connected loop.

Together, Báez and her mother stand on green, lush land, literally entwined in the act of replenishing the grounds that sustain them. The continuum of the garden hose not only evokes shared stewardship, but instead an invitation to inhabit this planet in nurturing ways. Here, the connection through the watering hose represents an alternate living always present, which thrives after, alongside, and in spite of colonial ruin. What comes after this moment? Báez closes the book between dimensions, as if history and the present are one in the same.