‘What We Carry Forward’ at The Sun ATL

The first thing visitors see at “What We Carry Forward,” on view at The Sun ATL through Nov. 21, is a woman in a long red-and-black robe. She stands in a golden landscape beside a domed church while a small figure rides a high-wheeled bicycle near her feet. The painting, Carlos Solis’ “The Vision of Saint Charles” (2021), holds what the curator Eric Bomba-Ire calls “childhood and adulthood, memory and dream, spirituality and imagination.” “I knew the exhibition needed that kind of beginning, where imagination comes before explanation,” said Bomba-Ire, who conceived the show and co-curated it with art dealer and gallerist Shawn Vinson. A figure folds into its own embrace in Catalina Gomez’s “Hugging Dreams” (2023), part of Between Shores, the second movement of “What We Carry Forward.” (Courtesy of Sun ATL) The question at the center of the show is one Bomba-Ire has lived with since he arrived in Atlanta in 1997: “What happens to what we inherit when we move between countries, cit