Polystyrene x Text series
Polystyrene x Text is a series of photographic artworks on polystyrene
with meticulously hand-carved text. Taken by the artist during his
trans-polar flights to Asia, these images show the fissuring of arctic
sea ice, digitally manipulated to exude unnaturally vivid colors that
suggest the palette of a postnatural landscape. A mirroring effect is
a further distortion of the image, which contorts the patterning of
the ice into an unnatural, geometric symmetry.

Aphoristic texts collected from the artist’s research and
conversations with philosopher Timothy Morton overlay these images
with ecological descriptions that uncannily evoke a postnatural world.
Guariglia has collaborated with Morton before to create aphoristic
language that calls attention to issues of ecology with both gravity
and humor. Here, several of Morton’s aphorisms speak alongside
Guariglia’s found language, examples of which include: POST NATURAL;
TROPHIC CASCADE; BIOSPHERE BBQ; and HURRICANE HUMAN , among others.
Emphasizing human impact on the environment, the carved lettering
ruptures the polystyrene, an intervention that recalls the breakage of
the sea ice and systemic violence on the natural world wreaked by
humans. The carving further serves to give the text body and material
weight, a function of Guariglia’s long-standing practice of pushing
the boundaries of photography into the realm of objects, and his
desire to communicate not just the visuality of climate crisis, but to
evoke the uncanny mix of feelings it produces: uncertainty and
confusion, despair, and hope.
Continuing in the artist’s practice of creating conceptual reciprocity
between his materials and subject matter, these works present a
tension between the precarious temporality of the pictured landscape
and the intensely archival quality of the polystyrene.