Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present She Who Holds the Sun, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Mary Anna Pomonis. Pomonis combines sacred geometry with feminist iconography to create visual systems that hold, transmit, and protect energy. Her crisp geometric abstractions on shaped canvas meld ideas from mathematics, feminist theory, spirituality, and history in paintings that are both objects and thresholds. The title of the exhibition reimagines the title of Shelley Parker-Chan’s 2021 novel She Who Became the Sun, a historical epic that follows its main character in pursuit of self-obliterating greatness. Pomonis flips this pursuit, instead describing a female artist who, rather than becoming the thing she creates, holds it for a time and lets it go, like a mother releasing her child. This fundamental act of creation and release also describes the process by which these paintings came to be: each one reimagines a painting lost in the devastating Eaton Fire that ripped through Altadena in January 2025, resulting in a transformational body of work that turns loss into spiritual and creative growth. 

Pomonis lost an entire exhibition of paintings to the wildfire, over a half decade of work destroyed overnight. Writing about the loss in the days immediately following the fire, Pomonis declared the burned works offerings to the feminine divine: “I gave my best work up in this fire to a power greater than all of us and I believe that power cannot truly be lost. I will be transformed by the power that consumed my artwork.” She Who Holds the Sun is a tribute to the creative process that came after the fire, a burst of potential born from the ashes of lost work. Each painting in the exhibition takes a burned painting as its starting point, evolving in form and color into a transformational composition that both holds its antecedent close and lovingly lets it go. By looking simultaneously to the past and the future, Pomonis pushes the boundaries of her own practice to achieve newly resonant heights. This work is not about rebuilding what was lost, but rather about listening to what the loss made possible. 

Pomonis uses commercial airbrush techniques to realize complex geometric abstractions built using wireframe geometry, which uses points and lines to describe three-dimensional forms in a two-dimensional space. Pomonis’s forms suggest shields, crowns, portals, and celestial structures floating through picture planes as if arrested in the midst of tumbling, heaving, or folding in on themselves. Their vibrating color creates a highly physical viewing experience, just as the intricate mathematical forms invite close looking – the viewer cannot help but attempt to visually untangle these complex topographies. Pomonis collaborates with a mathematician to build the geometric forms, which are closely connected to naturally-occurring crystal structures. She sees them as manifestations of sacred geometry, illustrations of the connectedness of all life and the power of the divine feminine through which creation flows. Each canvas acts as a window into a sacred space, much like the rose window of a cathedral.  

Many of the works reference mythological queens and goddesses, tapping into the feminine divine that has ruled over transitional spaces for millennia. Yet these works are atemporal: they invoke a historical sacred feminine while also embodying a futuristic vision of female power. Their art historical precedents range from Judy Chicago’s feminist declarations to Agnes Pelton’s transcendental desert paintings. Pomonis draws upon deeply rooted symbols and ideas – the temple, the crown of thorns, the ascension, the void – and in so doing activates a foundational symbolic energy. 

In the downstairs gallery, Pomonis has curated a group show, She Who Made Me, featuring many other feminist artists whose work have held up her practice over a long but quiet career prior to the fire. With this exhibition, Pomonis continues to ponder on the sacred nature of female relationships and their power to transform the world through their web of social, spiritual, academic, and political influence.