Sun Drowning
Solo Exhibition proposal
Artist: Virginia Broersma
Everyone seeks relief: from pain, from stress, from oppression, from the daily grind. Across time and place, people have sought relief through the sun, earth, and water.
In 2024, I created a painting of bodies piled underneath the hot sun, thawing out and bathing their skin. This came from my own somatic memories of letting the sun’s rays penetrate my skin, while I sank into its depths. At this same time, I was watching my mom slowly die. As her dementia progressed, it caused profound pain; for a time, she began experiencing episodes of confusion and anxiety in the late afternoon. She was “sundowning”. The painting, titled “Sun Drowning”, was made as I processed the decline of my mother’s mental health as a helpless bystander.
Being still under the warm hands of the sun as it massages my body relieves my own anxiety, stress and lifts the weight on my chest. Night swimming, lounging in hot tubs, and mud bathing are all practices that I’ve studied through painting. The physical pleasures I have explored in my work have in recent years taken on a new significance. Difficult things happen in life that can’t be changed, but “Sun Drowning” reminds me that caring for myself is not frivolous. It is the essential maintenance needed to deal with impossible circumstances.
As a Southern California native, I grew up surrounded by a culture of freedom, a skepticism toward convention, and a profound connection to the sun. These countercultural influences from my formative years are the ethos that I nurture and use to guide my work. I use pours, stains, and the serendipity of thinned-down paint on canvas to begin my paintings. I then us memory to paint the sensation of swimming, sunbathing, and soaking.
These practices have provided a salve for my pain, and I am not alone. From San Diego, to Los Angeles and Palm Springs, to Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Albion, in the Eastern Sierras along Route 395, all across the state of California, people have been soaking. California has a remarkable history of people seeking transformation through a wide range of practices involving the body, sun, earth, and water. Soaking in the sun and hot springs, baking mud into a crisp shell on the skin, and partaking in social spaces around water provide comfort, pleasure and health.
Everyone experiences loss, and we all will eventually decline. The exhibition is about pleasure’s role in the presence of mortality.
Selected Works:
Bio
Virginia Broersma is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on bodies at leisure with a nod to Southern California. Her engagement with the art community involves curating, writing, collaborative projects, public art, and organizing support for artists along with her studio practice.
Broersma’s work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and alternative spaces in Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, and Chicago among other US and international cities. Solo and collaborative exhibitions have been presented at The Beverly Hills Hotel (Beverly Hills, CA), The Lodge, (Los Angeles, CA), and the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Timothy Hawkinson and Wilding Cran (Los Angeles, CA), and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (Rancho Cucamonga, CA).
Broersma has received several grants from cities as well as private foundations, including the Jenni Crain Foundation, Mozaik Foundation, and the cities of Chicago, IL and Long Beach, CA. In 2025, she was awarded a residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and, after meeting a writer at the pool at nearby Hot Springs State Park, was interviewed about her residency experience for Cowboy State Daily.
Broersma takes on select curatorial and writing projects that relate to her interests in the studio and in 2016 was jointly selected for the Emerging Curators Program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Recent press has included articles and reviews in CARLA, Art and Cake and Artillery Magazine and her published writing projects have included features on video artist Rabyn Blake, DIY Projects in Los Angeles, and various exhibition catalogue essays and interviews with artists.
Broersma’s advocacy has included co-founding The Artist’s Contract and Studio Loan; two free resources for artists. She received a grant from the Sustainable Economies Legal Services fund to work with an attorney to support these resources. Her business, The Artist’s Office, has supported hundreds of artists through workshops, grant writing and low-cost subscription services.
Broersma lives in Long Beach, CA and her studio is located in Los Angeles, CA.
Contact:
vbroersma@gmail.com