Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s .... U s u a l l y
Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 1
June 08, 2026
June Poe, Orbiting
d. m. allison, Mission News, June 8, 2026 (word count 1,515, 24 images)
Turning onto the street toward Redbud Arts Center, the first thing I noticed was Someburger, still sitting there across the way like it had refused to participate in time, into a fifty year argument with progress.
I parked across the street near C&D Hardware, another survivor of the practical city, and the neighborhood’s favorite Christmas shopping. I crossed toward Redbud, carrying that odd feeling that comes when you are about to walk into a crowd, and into your past. Through Rock Romano’s exhibition in the east gallery, into the studio beyond, full of people I had known, many for half a lifetime. There are rooms in Houston where the past does not announce itself. It just looks up from a table, smiles, and says hello.
Gathered around a table of small works, were friends from high school and college. Lisa Lawrence was there, standing over a spread of red hearts and small award metals, pieces she had created in honor of our “Splendors And Sorrows, Trials And Tribulations, Persistence And Perseverance.” That phrase stayed with me, a roll call. At a certain age, those are not abstract words anymore. They are the inventory.
Beside her was her tall handsome husband, and nearby, Joe Lindley, an old art classmate and great guitar player from high school. The whole thing had the feeling of a reunion nobody had planned. There we were, still making things, still showing up, still recognizing one another across a long room of years. I noticed Ken Koplan, with more big toys, as usual with political intention, an artist I had shown before. Ken spells it KOPLAN, so spell it right, that’s how we keep one another from disappearing.
That was the mood I carried when I met Kelly’s son, June Poe, son of Kelly Moran One of my favorite artists, and Gil Poe, one of my favorite cutups. By then the room had already softened me up. I had walked in from Someburger and C&D Hardware, past old friends and small talismans of persistence, and into that particular Houston feeling where memory, art, and creativity all sit at the same table.
Taking the whole room in, I found myself standing next to Kelly Moran.
“How’s Jacob?” I asked. “He’s right there,” Kelly said.
In all the commotion of the studio, with art covering the walls, tables full of prints, old friends from high school and college, with the usual opening-night drift of people moving from one conversation to the next, I had missed the obvious.
Folded into the corner where my old office area used to be, pressed up against stacks of corrugated cardboard packing materials, was Kelly’s eldest. I hardly recognized him. Of course I didn’t. It had been at least fifteen years since I had last laid eyes on that artistic soul. He looked up, probably as surprised as I was.
“Do you remember your drawing of a DNA cannon?” I asked. “I think you might have been like six years old. I kept it here on my desk, right about where you’re standing, for years and years. Sorry I lost it.”
June looked surprised. “Oh yeah,” June said. “I remember that.” That seemed to break the ice. I shook his hand and gestured toward his art on the table.
“They look good,” I said. I was trying to process the name change and this person’s new trajectory in life while trying not to act a little surprised. And that is on me. I had not kept up with Kelly for years, maybe ten years?
On the table and walls around him were these bright, vibrating digital works, small but intense, like electronic minerals, woven circuitry, or little storms of pattern caught mid-formation. They had a strange handmade feeling even though they had come through code. Some looked like pixelated textiles. Some looked like maps. Some looked like old video games that had grown a nervous system.
“It’s kind of something that kind of fits in your head kind of,” June said, “where you, you kind of make your own context from looking at them, as opposed to, like, going for a certain, like, uh... I mean, you can draw shapes with them, for instance, but that’s, like, actually really hard to, like...”
He paused, trying to find the simplest way to explain a process that was not simple at all. “Okay, let’s say I wanna, like, draw a triangle. I have to remember, like, all the, yeah, keys to press to, like, actually get it to, like, morph into one.”
As he said this, June’s hands formed a cluster on his laptop keyboard, moving like someone playing a piano, or trying to coax a shape out of an invisible instrument.
“That sounds like this might be better for just jamming out,” I said. “Yeah. You know? Like, you know, the bass player plays something, then the saxophone comes in and does something off that, and then the, you know, the piano, and then you start to have fun and just jam out. “You just go, ‘Wow, we did that on purpose?’ ‘No, we’ve never done it before.’ You know? Right? It’s not a song. It’s not somebody else’s song.”
That seemed to get us closer. The work did not feel composed in the usual way. It felt improvised inside a set of rules, like a visual jam session between the artist, the program, and whatever strange little accidents the system allowed to bloom.
“I think it’s most similar to, like, an analog synthesizer,” June said, “where it’s like they use it a lot for, like, sound effects in a lot of old media. Right. And so they have, like, a sound diesel, basically, where they hook up a bunch of things to create, like, some sort of emergent sound, right? Try to capture some sort of sound effect.”
That made sense to me. Once he said analog synthesizer, I could see the pieces differently. The colors pulsed like tones. The repeated forms seemed to hum. The patterns were not illustrations of something; they were events. Little visual frequencies. Signals being tuned.
“And that, um, Pete Gershon worked with a group called Nameless Sound a lot,” I said, “and he’s the, you know, one of the ringmasters over at the Orange Show.” He wrote down Pete's name. He was listening. “ I think they would be real interested in what you’re doing here, too. Maybe having that,” I motioned at the laptop, “ you know, on a big projection, watching it grow on a screen or something, and you talk about it.”
“Yeah,” June said. “I’ll just have to do some manipulation on it to reduce flashing, just make sure it’s not gonna, like, give anyone a seizure. Like, I can stare at it for hours and hours and hours, but not everybody’s able to. No, it’s very meditative, I guess.”
That was the funny thing. The work looked electrically restless, full of flicker, collision, and code, but June talked about it as something meditative. And maybe that was right. There are people who meditate in silence. There are people who meditate by making dots, pulling ink, cutting metal, stitching cloth, fixing engines, or playing scales until the mind drops into the hand. June seemed to be meditating through systems, keys, collisions, patterns, and light. June was orbiting And I'm glad I got to catch a glimpse of his celestial path.
“Wow,” I said. “Well, congratulations, June. Looks good. Glad you joined the ol’ art clan here. You still playing tuba?”
“No, not really,” June said. “I, uh, I co, I compose music on the side, ’cause it’s fun, but, right, I haven’t been performing so much.”
And then, because old memory has no manners, I went straight back to the carpool days.
“And your mom would come to the studio after, you know, dropping you guys off from school, and she’d say, ‘The whole car smelled like feet.’ Ewww. She, she... Yeah. So all those hormones from those stinky boys.”
“It’s true,” June said. “Yeah, we, I remember we used to carpool, every day, yeah, like at six, but, yeah.”
“I’d like to have a picture of that car,” I said, “full of the instruments and the tuba and you guys and Kelly driving. That would be hilarious. Well, thanks for your time. I’ll see if I can get something written up. I don’t know.”
I walked away thinking about that invisible car, packed with kids, instruments, school smells, and the future before any of us knew what shape it would take. Years later, here we were in the same studio, or close enough to it, with Kelly nearby, old friends at the tables, Rock Romano’s paintings still ringing in the next room, and June standing in the corner where my desk used to be, showing work made from code, rhythm, accident, and patience.
One pattern grows out of another. Sometimes the scaffold is a program. Sometimes it is a family. Sometimes it is an old studio full of people who keep turning up, older, stranger, still making things.
(24 images Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen)
He paused, trying to find the simplest way to explain a process that was not simple at all. “Okay, let’s say I wanna, like, draw a triangle. I have to remember, like, all the, yeah, keys to press to, like, actually get it to, like, morph into one.” As he said this, June’s hands formed a cluster on his laptop keyboard, moving like someone playing a piano, or trying to coax a shape out of an invisible instrumen
FROM THE ARTIST:
My work is a series of freeze-frames of cellular automata produced by a program I wrote. Cellular automata are processes that evolve complex spatial patterns from very simple rule sets. By changing the ruleset and collisions, patterns can be grown out of each other. One way to imagine this is to think of heat-treating metals. If the temperature changes, the pattern of crystallization changes. In the same vein I change the rules and iterations, which creates a new pattern which grows out of the original. One process forms a scaffold to grow the second out of.
A delicate balance is struck between the pattern forming itself
and the human manipulation forming the pattern. It is a digital process that highly resembles an analog process, and the pieces produced can ride the line between analog and digital. The digital pattern producing machine is essentially plotted and produced by the analog human, and the toggling of simple on/off rules produces pleasing organic patterns. Patterns which are pleasing for the sake of themselves.
Tools used: C, GCC, Raylib, OpenMP, Linux, My Program, and a printer.
No AI was used in the making of this.